syncategorematic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
syncategorematic) wrote2006-03-10 12:40 pm
syncategorematic) wrote2006-03-10 12:40 pm
Entry tags:
Random Kindness and Irresponsible Hurt
What was the week all about?
First of all, I forgot to tell that on Friday afternoon, tired of the boys' slacking off and the dead silence in the van when I asked about sponsorship approaches, I wrote the following email to the trivia team, cc Lady Mollweide:
I returned home to tell my mother of this, and she reprimanded that I was being far too harsh on the boys. So I wrote a reply letter:
Society Max's letter itself is too amazing for words; however, it is not mine to quote, so I will not quote it.
Crows in the sky
Monks under the sky
And in a white shift
Between them I lie.
I lie in the open
Fair and bright.
Young is the wind.
Old is the light.
My funeral was
In a church's great inside.
I was a fair lady
A beautiful bride.
My soul stood near,
Stood singing right there...
But the people did not believe.
At the body they stared.
All fate and all prayer
Were all changing place.
My lover was silent
And on his pale face
The light from the candles
Would hardly fall...
Forgive, I
Always forgave him all.
...
The candle burned out,
The censer's chain gave,
The earth, with a moan,
Was becoming a grave...
I leapt past a chickadee
Into the sky -
Now I am free,
A white bird am I.
Above all my family
Circling I came,
And laughed, not understanding
Their grief at all.
We will meet again
But we won't be the same.
There is a true freedom...
I hear my flock's call.
Yuri Shevchuk apparently wrote that song in memory of his wife, who died of a brain tumour. My mother was talking at the dinner table of letting a friend listen to it, and weep. "It's the words he uses. Family (blood kin), the fact that she forgave her lover, always forgave him everything... We do that."
We do. (I took some liberties with the translation, and there is one verse I am missing.) Another song by the same author, I hummed more and more as I planned my sponsorship attacks:
I, I am a nerve coiled through, my throat is a fuse alight,
Ripping from the pressure to the ones that I will turn right.
I am the poet of the ending day, there are too many things I hate.
If you insult me in this way, I will simply kill you, Fate!
I am a shepherd, a wolf red-furred, no trick will I be taught.
Of toothless words I graze a herd, and of course I will marry the lot.
An electric chair am I of course, you can't sit long in my stead.
Yesterday I punched the Universe, raising my earthly cred!
Through the hungry mob
Standing in line for Art
Pushing them all aside
Uncaringly I shove through.
Press cheerfully harder on Art,
We will cut a path to its heart,
No doubts, to the heart of Art,
Friends, come with me and you!
(I managed internal rhyme, I managed internal rhyme in a translation, me clever as sin!)
At the Reach practice, I requested that someone, and not Kilhuch because he has enough with the website, and not me because I have already made that clear, design advertising posters for the trivia night.
A small scrappy grade nine volunteered, and I got his email address to give him the details, and as soon as I got home that afternoon I sent the following message (this is going to be quite the multi-style post):
Hi
Thank you very much for volunteering to do this; we really appreciate it. However, I must warn you, as I warned Kilhuch, that you will have to work under deadline, and the key word in deadline is dead :-)
Here is the info we need in the poster:
...
I think it will look better if the information is typed. If you do not have a graphics / photo editing program, my brother highly recommends the freeware GIMP from http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net - (if you use Windows) - that way you can either draw the whole thing on computer, or make a hand drawing, scan it in, and replace the handwritten text with typed text.
Now here comes the DEADLINE part: I would like to see and approve a soft copy of the poster (.jpg or .jpeg) by Thursday 12:20 pm, so that we can print them and start handing them out on Thursday after school or Friday. Which means that if you have a scanner at home or are doing the entire thing on computer, you have until Wednesday evening to do it; if you do not, you must get the poster, all but the typed text part, ready tonight and either scan it at school or give it to me on Wednesday at 3 o'clock by the Social Science office and I will take care of scanning it and replacing the text. Please send a reply email by 10 p.m today to let me know which of those options you prefer.
Good luck, and I will definitely find a way to reward you for that poster if it is good
I did not go home immediately because I stopped by the city hall. No one was sending anything to the mayor, so I guess I will. I was in luck: walking into the city hall I saw my dance ensemble director talking to Lord Pencilturn, and the two of them helped direct me to where the mayor's office actually was, where I eventually delivered the letter of request into someone's capable hands, then stopped to leave a letter to be passed to the office of the local councillor. However, silly me did not write in the councillor's name, which I myself consider rude, so I resolved to remedy my mistake the next day, as well as deliver letters to all other councillors Lady Mollweide and I judged to be even vaguely applicable.
There was no answer from the poster-writer by ten p.m. I resolved to go to the Social Science office by 3:00 the next day anyway. What can I say? I hope.
Wednesday was International Women's Day. As I explained to Carrie, in Russian culture that is basically Valentine's Day and Mother's Day rolled into one: if you do not give your women (mother, sister, wife, girlfriend, teacher, coworker, etc.) flowers or other tokens of your appreciation that day, o man, consider yourself a pariah doomed to sleeping on the couch for as long as memories last.
After 80 minutes' work with Carrie, where we got quite far in the transcription we were working on, I left for English Syntax. On coming back to the lab, I cannot even now remember for what, I greeted Carrie and Concolor --- for on Wednesday in the lab Concolor and I are like dawn and dusk in Pushkin's "and not allowing gloom to cover / The evening sky, dawn's roseate light / Flies to replace the blush of twilight / Giving but half an hour to night."
"So how far did you guys get?" I grinned.
"Nowhere," they sheepishly admitted. "Well, first we were talking about the Oscars, and..."
Carrie went on ahead, and Concolor and I had a conversation, that, in the spirit of my work, I will use a running joke Concolor started, and transcribe in CHAT format.
*TOU = Tourmaline
*CON = Concolor
%, %com = comments explaining the action
Of course, I am fudging it, and this conversation will definitely fail the CHECK command in the CLAN program all CHAT transcriptions are "compiled" with; there are neither hyphens not multiple utterance terminators (several sentences) allowed in the same speaker tier. And of course, there is no @Begin and @End. Derivation crashes.
However, let me remind Concolor that he was being very silly, and will probably be embarrassed later. but he did make me laugh. Perhaps the only time that day.
*TOU: I am going to the city hall again. You want to walk with me?
*CON: No, not this time. I am meeting Aldonza for lunch.
*TOU: [% mock pout] Aww, with Aldonza and not with me?
*CON: I can walk down to the first floor with you.
*TOU: Do that.
*CON: [% mischievously] I will walk down a floor with you. I think our relationship is ready to go to that next level, physically. We feel comfortable notching it up a level - or down a level, as the case might be.
*TOU: [% laughing hilariously] bye !
%com: Tourmaline walks outside; suddenly head of Concolor comes through the doors afterwards.
*CON: Wait, I have another one!
*CON: I am going to go down with you, that's it.
I was laughing all the way to City Hall. I can never think of walking downstairs with a man in the same way again.
However, my waiting at the Social Science office came to naught - the grade nine did not appear.
"Well," Lady Mollweide said, "I hate to ask yet another thing of you..."
"I will do it," I said quietly. "Tonight, after I am done at the Mac lab." At least coming in to the math office half an hour early should gain me half an hour of extra time.
The Dark Lord was not in his office. Nor was his coat. But his car was still there, so he must have gone somewhere that simply required crossing the campus, right? Saying hi to Lady Cauchy and Lady Runfar and Lady Melpomene, I declared that I will waylay him, parked myself in his chair again, and settled to read the Globe and Mail and Ottawa Citizen I had picked up in the Science Office.
I skip articles, but even so it takes me a while to read all the interesting content of two daily papers. The Ladies offered their sympathy, but they claimed they had not seen him at all in the last few days; he was always busy. At each slight sound in the hall, I was all ready to drop my paper and proceed to the lab to make a needed backup copy, but no sound was the lord whose dominion the lab was.
And dear all the gods there are, I hated wasting time, I who seems to live her days in hyperdrive, desperate to cram every bit of living she can into them. He could have left a message. He could have told someone. I was growing annoyed.
Finally, at 4:15 I stood up, and announced, "Ok, it's letter-writing time again."
The Ladies chuckled.
"The correspondence of the Dark Lord and the Lady Tourmaline," I sighed, "will be published one of those days. Of course, it is rather one-sided. May I have a piece of foolscap?"
And as I walked away from the school, the Dark Lord, in his car, drove past me.
If you insult me in this way, I would simply kill you, Fate!
I have heard that there is at least one site on which girls who had been hurt in love post names, photos and coordinates of men who jilted or stood them up, to warn other women to beware. Oh, I was angry enough for my wasted forty-five minutes to want to go to that site and enter the real name, real coordinates, and real photo of the Dark Lord, doing my part to ensure he sleeps on the couch for the rest of his life, for standing up Tourmaline Variety on International Women's Day!
Well, making the posters took the entire rest of my afternoon. And on to one in the morning. Since I do not have a colour printer, and the school does not have a colour printer (as far as I know; I go by Lady Mollweide's words, not the Dark Lord's), but Lady Mollweide does, it was to her that I was emailing every new version of the poster. The first one, although lovely in my sight, was too dark and too small-printed. I ended up making ten versions of the darned poster, in different colour schemes, and finally making a white one, I went to sleep without either showering, or, though it was my turn, washing the dishes.
The next day I got up to wash the dishes, only to meet my father's anger that I had not washed them the night before.
"I stayed up until one in the morning," I snarled, "making stupid posters for stupid trivia night, for your information."
"Well, why didn't you get someone else to do it?"
That was the straw that drove me to tears. It may be that birds and butterflies break out of shells when they grow up. Us humans build shells around ourselves on reaching adulthood, and mine is still too thin and too easily broken in places. "I did ask someone to do it! He never showed up! I had to do it myself!"
"Well," my father said practically, "don't associate with bastards."
"I know, easy for you to say! You can't know someone is a bastard until you find out!"
"True," my mother defended me, "you can't just assume everyone is a bastard to begin with."
"Well, you know what," my father said, "don't try doing it all yourself. Let it go on autopilot for a while, and watch what happens. What are those flowers doing on the table?"
"They're from your eldest son. He bought flowers for Tourmaline and me for Women's Day. We should take the carnations out, though; they'll kill the others soon if left with them."
Easy for you to say, I thought again. Thank be to the gods for Carrie, and for the fact I dropped Topology. I was twenty minutes late to my prescribed half-hour coding session, but I worked into the hour to balance everything out, letting Carrie read the Dose on the clock.
And I did not go to His de Maths either. There were two presentations scheduled, both in French, which the English speakers had the right to skip. Although I am by no means monolingual, I am even more vengeful than I am a French speaker. There had been three times in our nearly-five-year association that I had come to an appointed meeting to find the Dark Lord AWOL. And I, for one, am determined to not let such things pass without an explanation, or a making it clear that I am one to not let such things pass without an explanation.
My hunting led me to the math office, several times. His coat was in his office, but his laptop was not; his desk looked exactly as I left it yesterday, except for my letter. Out of curiosity, I casually looked into the garbage and recycling bins to see if my letter was there. It was not, but their levels were low' they could have been recently dumped.
"I tell you, Tourmaline," Lady Cauchy said, "I still haven't seen him."
"Well," I declared to the math office, "when you do see him, please tell him that Tourmaline is very angry with him, and she will probably yell at him when she next sees him."
I did not plan to yell at him. I planned to quietly explain to him that several people had let me down that day, and he was a person I had least wanted to be among them. That while I depended on him for the Mac lab access, on my side I had absolutely no leverage on him but whatever respect he had for me, and I was hurt to see no evidence of such respect yesterday.
It was Tanaquil who gave me the hint I needed to complete my hunt. He sat before his laptop in a computer lab. And of course, it is a truth universally avoiding acknowledgement that whenever I see the Dark Lord, whatever I planned to say in advance is lucky if 1% of it gets said (this is not a trait restircted to the Dark Lord alone, but strongly correlated with him). Darn the man, but perhaps what I do say is always the best of all possible statements.
*TOU: What happened yesterday?
*DAR: I had a meeting.
*TOU: And you could not have told someone in the math department to tell me?
*DAR: No.
*TOU: Well, I was very unhappy.
*DAR: I'm sorry. # You'll have time.
*TOU: [% trying to civilly get a point across] We seem to be running on different timelines. I don't have time.
*DAR: Isn't it for your thing in May?
*TOU: No, for my thing on March 31st. Which you kindly registered for me.
*DAR: You'll have time.
*TOU: How does Monday look?
*DAR: Monday looks fine."
*TOU: Okay then. [% Tourmaline moves to go] Have a good weekend.
*DAR: Wait a sec. Monday is March Break.
*TOU: Well, how does Friday look?
*DAR: You mean tomorrow? Bad.
*TOU: Even in the morning?
*DAR: Even in the morning.
*TOU: All right then. But it does make me hurt and unhappy. Have a good March Break.
%com: Tourmaline exits stage right and the camera follows her; end of session
@End
And thus went the reputed yelling session. If I go on this way, how would anyone believe that I can, and do, yell, that I can, and do, get mad at people, and that I can, if pressed, use all of my very extensive memory of someone I cared about enough to get angry at, and I can hit them where it really hurts. I do have a small nuke against the Dark Lord; I toyed very briefly while raging as to whether I should use it. But that is mutually assured destruction while I need the darned Mac because 80 MB of one of my heart's love children are stored on it; I cannot commit such evil. And so I had to grit my teeth and endure two men letting me down on International Women's Day. And, and my Russian woman's soul made tears sting at my eyes at this as I walked back to the university, my brother being the only man who gave me flowers. Well, I regarded it in perspective, if there had been a Mac session, I would not have had time to do all the posters. But I don't want to be a meek Patient Griselda. I remembered Zog's accusation of me being imperious, and I welcomed it with pleasure.
- From an early draft of my novel, deleted in later versions to make the plot sleeker. Yet Rimma is my alter ego, and I am the same way now as I was then. I yield to this alleged meeting. Because he had his reasons. And because that did allow me enough time for mine.
But that afternoon, our posse semi-organised a letter-handing-out trip. Cuchulain and Bedivere went with me, and, wonder of wonders, we managed to get three door prizes! As well as a bunch of letters handed out. We were safe, we were safe, we were safe!
Friday, though, I needed to pick up more letters from the school - it was the last day before March Break, everyone should have campaign letters, right?. I wheedled a twenty-minute break out of Carrie, and, humming, I proceeded on that path I tread so often.
The little grade nine who had failed me was talking to his friends in front of the building. His eyes on seeing me were full of that false bravado that this age seems to assume, as I gathered the deepest disgust my voice is capable of to tell him: "You're fired."
(I never watch reality TV, so I do not know how Donald Trump does it. I do it like me.)
"I quit!" he replied, protesting, as I walked past, coldly, without bothering to explain to him that normal people, when quitting, give two weeks' notice and reasonable reasons, and clear up all of their running obligations before leaving. I should know: I have quit two courses, a job, and three potential boyfriends; I know how to do it with dignity.
The Lady Mollweide greeted me warmly, but explained that I will need to print new letters - she will gladly sign them, but their department had a staff meeting right now, so she would be busy.
I know the sequence of steps by now and will remember it for a long time: the colours as once again the letter downloads from my email, the whirr of the warming laser printer --- and the smell, that soapy smell of heavy paper hot from laser ink, mixing with the smell of ballpoint ink as I deposit my messy signature on forty letters, one after another as still more are spewed by the dragon printer. The staff meeting ended just as my patience did, and I had time to tell the Lady Mollweide that I have taken all the prepared letters with her signature as well as mine. My letters are waiting for her signature to be complete. Then I headed back to the university with the quip I learned from CSI "Gotta go, I'm on the clock."
Then the realisation struck me: I had forgotten to get a newspaper! Any other day of the week I can live without a newspaper, but on Fridays, how can I live without knowing what Jay Stone of the Ottawa Citizen and the people at the Globe and Mail Review think of the movies opening in theatres that week? I asked Carrie's permission one more time to absent myself from work at 3:00, and ran off to the SocSci Office, ostensibly to pick up some politicians' letters, truly to pick up my movie and Facts and Arguments fix.
I strode out again, Citizen and Globe and Mail under my arm, keeping them pressed against my chest and only folded two-ply because of the heavy-paper letters between the sheets, when in the crowd of students rushing off to March Break I saw the Dark Lord exit.
"Have a good March Break," I said archly, with no trace of hard feelings in my voice, turned away, sidestepped off the sidewalk to avoid two overfashioned girls walking abreast, and landed hard on the side of my foot. I remained upright but I strained my left outside tendon that runs along the fibula, and it hurt annoyingly during dance class and still hurts now, on Monday. Moral, boys and girls, is: if your life involves a lot of dancing piqué turns in circles, saying hi to the Dark Lord may be hazardous to your career. Whether you have or have not forgiven him.
"Soren," I asked at dance rehearsal, "may I infringe on the hospitality of your car again this evening?" That is my convoluted way of asking people for a drive.
"Of course, of course."
"I feel a little embarrassed to be asking for things all the time," I said, stretching my leg on the barre.
"Well, you know," Soren said in that manner of his in which he and Rustem are identical, "most people, given the chance, are nice people. They like helping others. You know, there was a study done: they lost wallets in various cities, with $100 in them, and 99 times out of one hundred, the wallet would be returned with all the money intact."
"I heard of a different study," I said. "They put keys on the sidewalk and timed how long it would take for the keys to be stolen, in various cities. Moscow was the record, at seven minutes."
I spent my spare time watching Russian music awards shows - I need my fluff for my overtaxed soul. On Monday night, my whole family watched again as singer Dima Bilan (now Russia's representative for the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest) performed the song that won the professional jury prize for "New Songs About The Most Important Things"" "You Have To Be Near." I must say that whatever the song is like, that young man sang it believing in it - and currently I feel strongly when people sing without believing in their song - and I respect that. Indeed, he drove himself to a fever pitch in his performance, and in the post-song interview he still had trouble coming down from that transcendent existence. I know that feeling; it is the finest part of the performing arts, love, and bipolar disorder.
"He is a man possessed," my mother remarked. "Tourmaline, beware of tying your life to such a man."
I pointedly looked at my father. "Too late," I said, grinning mischievously.
First of all, I forgot to tell that on Friday afternoon, tired of the boys' slacking off and the dead silence in the van when I asked about sponsorship approaches, I wrote the following email to the trivia team, cc Lady Mollweide:
Gentlemen
I was very disappointed by the news that none of you have yet raised a cent to help the trivia night in four weeks. So I am forced to state the following concrete instructions:
1. Each one of you has until the end of March Break (March 19, 11:59 pm EST) to raise at least $300, including one Gold Sponsor. Otherwise, at that time (12:00 am March 20) I will access our registration form at NAQT and REMOVE ALL PLAYERS WHO HAD NOT DONE ENOUGH FUNDRAISING FROM THE TEAM. Even if you are the best player on the team, if you really do not want to go, there is no point in taking you.
2. If doing this removing leaves me with less than THREE (3) players who have shown themselves willing to go, I WILL CANCEL OUR TEAM PARTICIPATION, THE TRIP, AND THE TRIVIA NIGHT. I do not care if the two remaining players raised a thousand dollars each; a two-person Canadian team against four-person American teams will make Canada look really bad, and so it is better not to go. i WILL CANCEL THE WEBSITE AS WELL. If we are bragging about our prowess to the world and are at the same time doing nothing to show we actually work hard, we are lying to the world.
So mobilise your family, print those attached letters on heavy paper, ordinary paper, pink paper, or flowery paper or what have you, and get to work. If you are absolutely desperate by the 19th, bring in $400 and your family will be named Gold Sponsor (the extra charge is so fewer of you will go for that option).
I simply cannot carry all the work of doing this on my own small shoulders. In case you do not know, I am a full-time third-year student in an honours double-degree program (fifteen hours a week PLUS homework and there's lots of it); I work ten hours a week, have dance rehearsal for eight hours a week, work on an instructional martial arts video for six hours a week, and work on your trivia night slideshow for five to six hours a week. And I also have to travel to all those places and to sleep. There simply is not enough time for me to try to raise at least eight trivia night sponsors by myself as well; otherwise there will be no trivia night anyway, because I will be in Royal Ottawa.
If you have any questions, please reply.
I will see you on Tuesday.
I returned home to tell my mother of this, and she reprimanded that I was being far too harsh on the boys. So I wrote a reply letter:
Tourmaline to Lady Mollweide
I will watch and see whether they will call my bluff; my own family is now accusing me of being too harsh on the kids. I may actually be lenient about the $300 and if they come crying to me on the 19th saying "Tourmaline, we only have $150 and one door prize!" I will definitely cut them slack. However, if they shoot for the moon and miss, they will still land among the stars somewhere, as that cliche goes, so for now I do not want them to know that I am prepared to settle for less. What I will settle for, in the end run, is some sponsor name on every slide, and at least ten teams actually appearing at the trivia night. Soceity Max is currently playing good cop to my bad cop; he is sending them Cyberus's sponsorship web page.
Don't tell 'em.
Society Max's letter itself is too amazing for words; however, it is not mine to quote, so I will not quote it.
Crows in the sky
Monks under the sky
And in a white shift
Between them I lie.
I lie in the open
Fair and bright.
Young is the wind.
Old is the light.
My funeral was
In a church's great inside.
I was a fair lady
A beautiful bride.
My soul stood near,
Stood singing right there...
But the people did not believe.
At the body they stared.
All fate and all prayer
Were all changing place.
My lover was silent
And on his pale face
The light from the candles
Would hardly fall...
Forgive, I
Always forgave him all.
...
The candle burned out,
The censer's chain gave,
The earth, with a moan,
Was becoming a grave...
I leapt past a chickadee
Into the sky -
Now I am free,
A white bird am I.
Above all my family
Circling I came,
And laughed, not understanding
Their grief at all.
We will meet again
But we won't be the same.
There is a true freedom...
I hear my flock's call.
Yuri Shevchuk apparently wrote that song in memory of his wife, who died of a brain tumour. My mother was talking at the dinner table of letting a friend listen to it, and weep. "It's the words he uses. Family (blood kin), the fact that she forgave her lover, always forgave him everything... We do that."
We do. (I took some liberties with the translation, and there is one verse I am missing.) Another song by the same author, I hummed more and more as I planned my sponsorship attacks:
I, I am a nerve coiled through, my throat is a fuse alight,
Ripping from the pressure to the ones that I will turn right.
I am the poet of the ending day, there are too many things I hate.
If you insult me in this way, I will simply kill you, Fate!
I am a shepherd, a wolf red-furred, no trick will I be taught.
Of toothless words I graze a herd, and of course I will marry the lot.
An electric chair am I of course, you can't sit long in my stead.
Yesterday I punched the Universe, raising my earthly cred!
Through the hungry mob
Standing in line for Art
Pushing them all aside
Uncaringly I shove through.
Press cheerfully harder on Art,
We will cut a path to its heart,
No doubts, to the heart of Art,
Friends, come with me and you!
(I managed internal rhyme, I managed internal rhyme in a translation, me clever as sin!)
At the Reach practice, I requested that someone, and not Kilhuch because he has enough with the website, and not me because I have already made that clear, design advertising posters for the trivia night.
A small scrappy grade nine volunteered, and I got his email address to give him the details, and as soon as I got home that afternoon I sent the following message (this is going to be quite the multi-style post):
Hi
Thank you very much for volunteering to do this; we really appreciate it. However, I must warn you, as I warned Kilhuch, that you will have to work under deadline, and the key word in deadline is dead :-)
Here is the info we need in the poster:
...
I think it will look better if the information is typed. If you do not have a graphics / photo editing program, my brother highly recommends the freeware GIMP from http://gimp-win.sourceforge
Now here comes the DEADLINE part: I would like to see and approve a soft copy of the poster (.jpg or .jpeg) by Thursday 12:20 pm, so that we can print them and start handing them out on Thursday after school or Friday. Which means that if you have a scanner at home or are doing the entire thing on computer, you have until Wednesday evening to do it; if you do not, you must get the poster, all but the typed text part, ready tonight and either scan it at school or give it to me on Wednesday at 3 o'clock by the Social Science office and I will take care of scanning it and replacing the text. Please send a reply email by 10 p.m today to let me know which of those options you prefer.
Good luck, and I will definitely find a way to reward you for that poster if it is good
I did not go home immediately because I stopped by the city hall. No one was sending anything to the mayor, so I guess I will. I was in luck: walking into the city hall I saw my dance ensemble director talking to Lord Pencilturn, and the two of them helped direct me to where the mayor's office actually was, where I eventually delivered the letter of request into someone's capable hands, then stopped to leave a letter to be passed to the office of the local councillor. However, silly me did not write in the councillor's name, which I myself consider rude, so I resolved to remedy my mistake the next day, as well as deliver letters to all other councillors Lady Mollweide and I judged to be even vaguely applicable.
There was no answer from the poster-writer by ten p.m. I resolved to go to the Social Science office by 3:00 the next day anyway. What can I say? I hope.
Wednesday was International Women's Day. As I explained to Carrie, in Russian culture that is basically Valentine's Day and Mother's Day rolled into one: if you do not give your women (mother, sister, wife, girlfriend, teacher, coworker, etc.) flowers or other tokens of your appreciation that day, o man, consider yourself a pariah doomed to sleeping on the couch for as long as memories last.
After 80 minutes' work with Carrie, where we got quite far in the transcription we were working on, I left for English Syntax. On coming back to the lab, I cannot even now remember for what, I greeted Carrie and Concolor --- for on Wednesday in the lab Concolor and I are like dawn and dusk in Pushkin's "and not allowing gloom to cover / The evening sky, dawn's roseate light / Flies to replace the blush of twilight / Giving but half an hour to night."
"So how far did you guys get?" I grinned.
"Nowhere," they sheepishly admitted. "Well, first we were talking about the Oscars, and..."
Carrie went on ahead, and Concolor and I had a conversation, that, in the spirit of my work, I will use a running joke Concolor started, and transcribe in CHAT format.
*TOU = Tourmaline
*CON = Concolor
%, %com = comments explaining the action
Of course, I am fudging it, and this conversation will definitely fail the CHECK command in the CLAN program all CHAT transcriptions are "compiled" with; there are neither hyphens not multiple utterance terminators (several sentences) allowed in the same speaker tier. And of course, there is no @Begin and @End. Derivation crashes.
However, let me remind Concolor that he was being very silly, and will probably be embarrassed later. but he did make me laugh. Perhaps the only time that day.
*TOU: I am going to the city hall again. You want to walk with me?
*CON: No, not this time. I am meeting Aldonza for lunch.
*TOU: [% mock pout] Aww, with Aldonza and not with me?
*CON: I can walk down to the first floor with you.
*TOU: Do that.
*CON: [% mischievously] I will walk down a floor with you. I think our relationship is ready to go to that next level, physically. We feel comfortable notching it up a level - or down a level, as the case might be.
*TOU: [% laughing hilariously] bye !
%com: Tourmaline walks outside; suddenly head of Concolor comes through the doors afterwards.
*CON: Wait, I have another one!
*CON: I am going to go down with you, that's it.
I was laughing all the way to City Hall. I can never think of walking downstairs with a man in the same way again.
However, my waiting at the Social Science office came to naught - the grade nine did not appear.
"Well," Lady Mollweide said, "I hate to ask yet another thing of you..."
"I will do it," I said quietly. "Tonight, after I am done at the Mac lab." At least coming in to the math office half an hour early should gain me half an hour of extra time.
The Dark Lord was not in his office. Nor was his coat. But his car was still there, so he must have gone somewhere that simply required crossing the campus, right? Saying hi to Lady Cauchy and Lady Runfar and Lady Melpomene, I declared that I will waylay him, parked myself in his chair again, and settled to read the Globe and Mail and Ottawa Citizen I had picked up in the Science Office.
I skip articles, but even so it takes me a while to read all the interesting content of two daily papers. The Ladies offered their sympathy, but they claimed they had not seen him at all in the last few days; he was always busy. At each slight sound in the hall, I was all ready to drop my paper and proceed to the lab to make a needed backup copy, but no sound was the lord whose dominion the lab was.
And dear all the gods there are, I hated wasting time, I who seems to live her days in hyperdrive, desperate to cram every bit of living she can into them. He could have left a message. He could have told someone. I was growing annoyed.
Finally, at 4:15 I stood up, and announced, "Ok, it's letter-writing time again."
The Ladies chuckled.
"The correspondence of the Dark Lord and the Lady Tourmaline," I sighed, "will be published one of those days. Of course, it is rather one-sided. May I have a piece of foolscap?"
Dark Lord,
3:30 - 4:15
"Tell them I came, and no one answered.
Tell them I kept my word."
And I ate your chocolate, too.
--- Tourmaline Variety
And as I walked away from the school, the Dark Lord, in his car, drove past me.
If you insult me in this way, I would simply kill you, Fate!
I have heard that there is at least one site on which girls who had been hurt in love post names, photos and coordinates of men who jilted or stood them up, to warn other women to beware. Oh, I was angry enough for my wasted forty-five minutes to want to go to that site and enter the real name, real coordinates, and real photo of the Dark Lord, doing my part to ensure he sleeps on the couch for the rest of his life, for standing up Tourmaline Variety on International Women's Day!
Well, making the posters took the entire rest of my afternoon. And on to one in the morning. Since I do not have a colour printer, and the school does not have a colour printer (as far as I know; I go by Lady Mollweide's words, not the Dark Lord's), but Lady Mollweide does, it was to her that I was emailing every new version of the poster. The first one, although lovely in my sight, was too dark and too small-printed. I ended up making ten versions of the darned poster, in different colour schemes, and finally making a white one, I went to sleep without either showering, or, though it was my turn, washing the dishes.
The next day I got up to wash the dishes, only to meet my father's anger that I had not washed them the night before.
"I stayed up until one in the morning," I snarled, "making stupid posters for stupid trivia night, for your information."
"Well, why didn't you get someone else to do it?"
That was the straw that drove me to tears. It may be that birds and butterflies break out of shells when they grow up. Us humans build shells around ourselves on reaching adulthood, and mine is still too thin and too easily broken in places. "I did ask someone to do it! He never showed up! I had to do it myself!"
"Well," my father said practically, "don't associate with bastards."
"I know, easy for you to say! You can't know someone is a bastard until you find out!"
"True," my mother defended me, "you can't just assume everyone is a bastard to begin with."
"Well, you know what," my father said, "don't try doing it all yourself. Let it go on autopilot for a while, and watch what happens. What are those flowers doing on the table?"
"They're from your eldest son. He bought flowers for Tourmaline and me for Women's Day. We should take the carnations out, though; they'll kill the others soon if left with them."
Easy for you to say, I thought again. Thank be to the gods for Carrie, and for the fact I dropped Topology. I was twenty minutes late to my prescribed half-hour coding session, but I worked into the hour to balance everything out, letting Carrie read the Dose on the clock.
And I did not go to His de Maths either. There were two presentations scheduled, both in French, which the English speakers had the right to skip. Although I am by no means monolingual, I am even more vengeful than I am a French speaker. There had been three times in our nearly-five-year association that I had come to an appointed meeting to find the Dark Lord AWOL. And I, for one, am determined to not let such things pass without an explanation, or a making it clear that I am one to not let such things pass without an explanation.
My hunting led me to the math office, several times. His coat was in his office, but his laptop was not; his desk looked exactly as I left it yesterday, except for my letter. Out of curiosity, I casually looked into the garbage and recycling bins to see if my letter was there. It was not, but their levels were low' they could have been recently dumped.
"I tell you, Tourmaline," Lady Cauchy said, "I still haven't seen him."
"Well," I declared to the math office, "when you do see him, please tell him that Tourmaline is very angry with him, and she will probably yell at him when she next sees him."
I did not plan to yell at him. I planned to quietly explain to him that several people had let me down that day, and he was a person I had least wanted to be among them. That while I depended on him for the Mac lab access, on my side I had absolutely no leverage on him but whatever respect he had for me, and I was hurt to see no evidence of such respect yesterday.
It was Tanaquil who gave me the hint I needed to complete my hunt. He sat before his laptop in a computer lab. And of course, it is a truth universally avoiding acknowledgement that whenever I see the Dark Lord, whatever I planned to say in advance is lucky if 1% of it gets said (this is not a trait restircted to the Dark Lord alone, but strongly correlated with him). Darn the man, but perhaps what I do say is always the best of all possible statements.
*TOU: What happened yesterday?
*DAR: I had a meeting.
*TOU: And you could not have told someone in the math department to tell me?
*DAR: No.
*TOU: Well, I was very unhappy.
*DAR: I'm sorry. # You'll have time.
*TOU: [% trying to civilly get a point across] We seem to be running on different timelines. I don't have time.
*DAR: Isn't it for your thing in May?
*TOU: No, for my thing on March 31st. Which you kindly registered for me.
*DAR: You'll have time.
*TOU: How does Monday look?
*DAR: Monday looks fine."
*TOU: Okay then. [% Tourmaline moves to go] Have a good weekend.
*DAR: Wait a sec. Monday is March Break.
*TOU: Well, how does Friday look?
*DAR: You mean tomorrow? Bad.
*TOU: Even in the morning?
*DAR: Even in the morning.
*TOU: All right then. But it does make me hurt and unhappy. Have a good March Break.
%com: Tourmaline exits stage right and the camera follows her; end of session
@End
And thus went the reputed yelling session. If I go on this way, how would anyone believe that I can, and do, yell, that I can, and do, get mad at people, and that I can, if pressed, use all of my very extensive memory of someone I cared about enough to get angry at, and I can hit them where it really hurts. I do have a small nuke against the Dark Lord; I toyed very briefly while raging as to whether I should use it. But that is mutually assured destruction while I need the darned Mac because 80 MB of one of my heart's love children are stored on it; I cannot commit such evil. And so I had to grit my teeth and endure two men letting me down on International Women's Day. And, and my Russian woman's soul made tears sting at my eyes at this as I walked back to the university, my brother being the only man who gave me flowers. Well, I regarded it in perspective, if there had been a Mac session, I would not have had time to do all the posters. But I don't want to be a meek Patient Griselda. I remembered Zog's accusation of me being imperious, and I welcomed it with pleasure.
"Because it is now over. Because Ve-Kesh had his reasons."
"He had his reasons!" It was Juan's outburst this time. "Rimma, if someone was going to murder you, would you lie back and let him because he has his reasons?"
"For one thing, if he is incredibly abysmally stupid enough to actually consider murdering me," Rimma dragged out, "he'd better have pretty amazingly good reasons, and I don't think insanity or brainlessness count. For another, let's now stop discussing the past we cannot change, and turn to the future that we must."
- From an early draft of my novel, deleted in later versions to make the plot sleeker. Yet Rimma is my alter ego, and I am the same way now as I was then. I yield to this alleged meeting. Because he had his reasons. And because that did allow me enough time for mine.
But that afternoon, our posse semi-organised a letter-handing-out trip. Cuchulain and Bedivere went with me, and, wonder of wonders, we managed to get three door prizes! As well as a bunch of letters handed out. We were safe, we were safe, we were safe!
Friday, though, I needed to pick up more letters from the school - it was the last day before March Break, everyone should have campaign letters, right?. I wheedled a twenty-minute break out of Carrie, and, humming, I proceeded on that path I tread so often.
The little grade nine who had failed me was talking to his friends in front of the building. His eyes on seeing me were full of that false bravado that this age seems to assume, as I gathered the deepest disgust my voice is capable of to tell him: "You're fired."
(I never watch reality TV, so I do not know how Donald Trump does it. I do it like me.)
"I quit!" he replied, protesting, as I walked past, coldly, without bothering to explain to him that normal people, when quitting, give two weeks' notice and reasonable reasons, and clear up all of their running obligations before leaving. I should know: I have quit two courses, a job, and three potential boyfriends; I know how to do it with dignity.
The Lady Mollweide greeted me warmly, but explained that I will need to print new letters - she will gladly sign them, but their department had a staff meeting right now, so she would be busy.
I know the sequence of steps by now and will remember it for a long time: the colours as once again the letter downloads from my email, the whirr of the warming laser printer --- and the smell, that soapy smell of heavy paper hot from laser ink, mixing with the smell of ballpoint ink as I deposit my messy signature on forty letters, one after another as still more are spewed by the dragon printer. The staff meeting ended just as my patience did, and I had time to tell the Lady Mollweide that I have taken all the prepared letters with her signature as well as mine. My letters are waiting for her signature to be complete. Then I headed back to the university with the quip I learned from CSI "Gotta go, I'm on the clock."
Then the realisation struck me: I had forgotten to get a newspaper! Any other day of the week I can live without a newspaper, but on Fridays, how can I live without knowing what Jay Stone of the Ottawa Citizen and the people at the Globe and Mail Review think of the movies opening in theatres that week? I asked Carrie's permission one more time to absent myself from work at 3:00, and ran off to the SocSci Office, ostensibly to pick up some politicians' letters, truly to pick up my movie and Facts and Arguments fix.
I strode out again, Citizen and Globe and Mail under my arm, keeping them pressed against my chest and only folded two-ply because of the heavy-paper letters between the sheets, when in the crowd of students rushing off to March Break I saw the Dark Lord exit.
"Have a good March Break," I said archly, with no trace of hard feelings in my voice, turned away, sidestepped off the sidewalk to avoid two overfashioned girls walking abreast, and landed hard on the side of my foot. I remained upright but I strained my left outside tendon that runs along the fibula, and it hurt annoyingly during dance class and still hurts now, on Monday. Moral, boys and girls, is: if your life involves a lot of dancing piqué turns in circles, saying hi to the Dark Lord may be hazardous to your career. Whether you have or have not forgiven him.
"Soren," I asked at dance rehearsal, "may I infringe on the hospitality of your car again this evening?" That is my convoluted way of asking people for a drive.
"Of course, of course."
"I feel a little embarrassed to be asking for things all the time," I said, stretching my leg on the barre.
"Well, you know," Soren said in that manner of his in which he and Rustem are identical, "most people, given the chance, are nice people. They like helping others. You know, there was a study done: they lost wallets in various cities, with $100 in them, and 99 times out of one hundred, the wallet would be returned with all the money intact."
"I heard of a different study," I said. "They put keys on the sidewalk and timed how long it would take for the keys to be stolen, in various cities. Moscow was the record, at seven minutes."
I spent my spare time watching Russian music awards shows - I need my fluff for my overtaxed soul. On Monday night, my whole family watched again as singer Dima Bilan (now Russia's representative for the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest) performed the song that won the professional jury prize for "New Songs About The Most Important Things"" "You Have To Be Near." I must say that whatever the song is like, that young man sang it believing in it - and currently I feel strongly when people sing without believing in their song - and I respect that. Indeed, he drove himself to a fever pitch in his performance, and in the post-song interview he still had trouble coming down from that transcendent existence. I know that feeling; it is the finest part of the performing arts, love, and bipolar disorder.
"He is a man possessed," my mother remarked. "Tourmaline, beware of tying your life to such a man."
I pointedly looked at my father. "Too late," I said, grinning mischievously.