Lokys.net

Let's be honest: living a literal thousand miles away from the person you love above everything else in the world can be pretty miserable. There's just no substitute for touch, for sight, for the simple ability to do considerate things for your significant other just to show them that you love them and want to make their life better in some small way.

On the plus side, though, when you do come up with an inventive method for surprising them with something nice, the unexpectedness and improbability of the gesture makes the impact that much stronger.

Caspian (9:21:53 PM): Somebody is knocking, I think.
Kate (9:22:32 PM): I bet it's Haas.
Caspian (9:22:52 PM): Lost pizza guy. >_>
Kate (9:23:01 PM): Not lost.
Kate (9:23:35 PM): You... you didn't send him away, did you?
Caspian (9:23:47 PM): ...love?
Kate (9:23:51 PM): Go get him back.
Caspian (9:24:00 PM): He was gone by the time I got there.
Kate (9:25:01 PM): If it was Domino's, call them.
Caspian (9:25:37 PM): I just got a call from an incredibly confused "Matt". :3
Kate (9:26:10 PM): You should tell Matt his driver is an idiot who needs to wait longer than 30 seconds before giving up on people.
Kate (9:26:54 PM): And his incompetence ruined a perfectly good surprise ._.
Caspian (9:29:13 PM): It gets better. :3
Caspian (9:29:29 PM): It was Matt.
Caspian (9:29:59 PM): Like... guitar shop Matt.
Kate (9:30:19 PM): Huh?
Caspian (9:31:06 PM): The Matt who gives guitar lessons three shops over from my studio.
Kate (9:31:10 PM): Right.
Kate (9:31:15 PM): What does that have to do with pizza?
Caspian (9:31:24 PM): He is a delivery guy, evidently.
Kate (9:31:49 PM): Oh.
Kate (9:31:57 PM): Is he bringing you back your damned pizza?
Caspian (9:32:01 PM): I was on the phone with him as you were telling me I needed to go get him, so I was still surprised. In fact, it was pretty fuckawesome.
Caspian (9:33:06 PM): "Hey, uh, Caspian, this is Matt from Dominos." "Oh. Hi... Matt." "Hey... are you about half a block down from the college parking lot?" "Yeah, but I'm not expecting a pizza..."
Caspian (9:33:37 PM): Not lost.
Caspian (9:33:53 PM): "Well... we've got an order from Canada..."
Kate (9:34:00 PM): :3
Caspian (9:34:11 PM): You... you didn't send him away[...]
Caspian (9:34:20 PM): "From someone named Kate...?"
Caspian (9:34:27 PM): "Kate Morris."
Caspian (9:34:36 PM): "Yeah, I turned on my porch light. >_>"
Caspian (9:35:33 PM): Oh this smells good. :3
Caspian (9:35:36 PM): Kate?
Kate (9:35:40 PM): Caspian?
Caspian (9:35:56 PM): You spoil me rotten. And think of the best surprises.

There isn't a whole lot of good that can be said about eating on the road. One fast food joint is very much the same as the next; that's the entire point of them. And on the highway, you don't exactly have a lot of choice in either the nature or the timing of your food. You can have a burger at the McDonald's off exit 181, or a burger at the Wendy's off exit 196, or you can wait another 20 miles and luck out with a burger at the Steak 'n Shake off exit 216, but either way, you're getting a lump of grease on a bun. There are some minor exceptions to the rule - Caspian insisted that I try the chicken planks at Long John Silver's, and I had to admit that the fishen (as I called it) was more tasty than poulty from a seafood place had any right to be - but generally speaking, you take what you get.

That holds especially true in the less populated parts of the country, like for instance Michigan. So, when I looked at the clock on my drive back from visiting Caspian and saw that it was around 6pm, I pretty well knew what I would be having for dinner. I even knew which McDonald's I'd be dining at, I remembered driving past it on the way down.

I was actually off the interstate at that point, jogging east on M-55 to pick up 127/I-75. And about halfway along, I passed through the little community of Lake City. It was full dark by then, but I had seen it in daylight going southbound: nice enough place, the kind of town where the main street is actually called Main Street and every business worthy of the title has footage on it. I passed a Dairy Queen, closed for the season. Then just past it I saw a big gravel parking lot, halfway full on a Tuesday evening in November, and beyond the parking lot there was a sturdy broad-shouldered slab of a building with the sign "Lake City Homestyle Cafe" lit up out front and a warm glow of light spilling into the street from the big plate glass windows.

I thought of the McDonald's two miles up the road, and I pulled into the parking lot and walked inside.

The place was busy, even moreso than the cars had suggested. Tuesday evening in November, two days before Thanksgiving, and it looked like half of Lake City had gone out for dinner at the Homestyle Cafe as a prelude to the larger celebrations to come. Families, mostly: a few adults with aged parents, several middle-aged couples with children. One enormous old man sitting by himself at a central table with an equally beefy bowl of chili in front of him, gazing around benevolently between bites, a king holding court over subjects no-one else could see.

There only seemed to be one waitress, pretty in an old-fashioned way, with dark straight hair and a thin pale face. She nodded at me when I came in, then scurried off to take an order, and I stood hesitantly in the entrance for a few minutes, waiting to be seated somewhere. When she made her way back to the front of the cafe she looked surprised to see me still there.

"You can just take a seat anywhere you like, I'll be right with you." Her voice was friendly, with the clean northern accent that sounds so much like our own, but there was a broad undercurrent of You're not from here, are you? riding underneath it. I slipped into a booth against the wall, and looked around.

It was ugly. Martha Stewart would have thrown her hand up and declared it just too ridiculously country-classic, all paisley and lace and varnished oak. There was something framed on the wall by my booth: the Lake City Agricultural High School graduation portraits, class of 1947, smiling all-American faces arranged in neat rows above the avuncular images of the staff. There was a salad bar nestled into the back corner, and a whiteboard announcing the soups (butternut squash, chili) and pies (apple, cherry, pumpkin, blueberry, strawberry rhubarb) of the day. The place smelled like coffee and meatloaf and scalloped potatoes. It was beautiful.

The waitress brought me a menu and a set of cutlery, apologizing for the wait. I assured her it was no problem, and I meant it, too. I quickly figured out what I wanted, caught her eye the next time she rushed by so I could place my order, then I settled in to watch the people.

I don't get the chance to do that often. I don't go out much, and when I do, it's always for a specific purpose: I go in, I get what I need, I leave. So, being able to just sit for ten minutes and quietly observe was a real treat.

One table in particular caught my eye. They were close to me, just past the corpulent king with his chili. Three of them, three generations: a weathered older man, a 30something hiding his retreating hairline with an aggressive brush cut, and a husky boy, who looked to be maybe twelve years old. The middle man wasn't the boy's father, I could tell that much. An uncle, perhaps, home for the holidays? A relative, certainly, who seemed to be intent on catching up. While I waited for my food, I heard him asking the boy a dozen questions about how he was doing in school, what position he was playing on the football team, what weight training exercises he was doing. He talked to the older man, too, about hunting the next day. He asked the boy if he was excited at being able to use a rifle on the hunt this year.

My dinner arrived - a magnificent patty melt, half a pound of locally-raised ground beef on rye with swiss cheese and tomatoes. My own personal blissfully smiling fuck-you to McDonald's. I ate, slowly, and before I was finished, the trio received their food as well.

The older man removed his hat. All three lowered their heads. And the boy said grace. I couldn't hear the words, but it was short and seemed both respectful and completely matter of fact. There was no discussion, they didn't even glance around to see if anyone was watching, and after the murmured "Amen" they fell right back to talking about shooting turkeys.

I've eaten at a lot of restaurants in my life, on three continents, everything from trendy little basement dives in Toronto to clam shacks on Nova Scotia's south shore to a dingy fish and chip shop in Alexandria, NZ, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone say grace in public like that before. It was oddly wonderful to witness: simple faith, displayed with the ease of long habit and comfort.

I polished off my dinner, paid, and left a $3 tip on a $6 meal. That made it almost twice as expensive as a McDonald's combo would have been, and it took an hour out of my drive instead of five minutes.

It was well worth the cost.

And the next time I'm passing through Lake City again, I'll be sure to stop by. I bet they do a damned fine breakfast.

One of the most easily observable differences between the United States and Canada is that the former actually has radio stations while the latter does not.

When I drive from Barrie to Sudbury, there is nothing. I could find more music by rolling the window down an inch and letting the wind whistle in than I could by scanning the entire FM and AM ranges. Occasionally, I hit a few bursts of static-ridden French talk radio, and once I picked up CBC Radio 2 for about 10km, but aside from that, it's hopeless.

Driving through Michigan, on the other hand, going south to north over the course of an evening, I heard an hour-long classical program featuring some Liszt piano with orchestral accompaniment (meh), a quirky little strings trio doing gypsy folk dances (not bad), and a solo guitarist playing Bach (exquisite); a half-hour moralistic religious program consisting of a fictionalized dramatic narrative about an arrogant out-of-work actor who was converted from an angry, conflicted (and therefore marginally interesting) character to a passively smiling lamb of God by accepting Christ as his personal saviour; all the Bing Crosby and traditional Christmas carols I could stomach a month before the actual holiday; CNN news, repeating the same half-dozen stories over and over again - slow news day, I guess; the standard pseudo-edgy mainstream rock; an oldies station, on which a girl who couldn't have been more than 8 called in to request Elvis Presley's "Devil in Disguise" for her grandmother; and, of course, country music, filling every second interval of the dial, overflowing the airwaves like a ton of topsoil dumped in the bed of a half-ton pickup truck.

Country music is, I must admit, a guilty pleasure of mine. The vast majority of it is purely awful, of course, as far as musical quality goes. But it does have the distinction of being one of the few genres left these days whose songs actually tell a story. I've always been a sucker for story-songs, you can't grow up listening to Harry Chapin and the Fairport Convention version of "Matty Groves" without developing a bone-deep affection for the combination of music and narrative. It's an ancient tradition, really, and a proud one: before opera, before orchestras, before everything we knew of modern music, bards held smoke-filled meadhalls enraptured with sung tales of glory and trickery and love.

The bloodline of that heritage has been diluted considerably to reach its current embodiment in, say, Billy Ray Cyrus, which is why I would never own a country CD - it's not worth paying for. I couldn't even be bothered to download it. But when I've been on the road for 10 hours straight with another 6 to go, the sheer novelty of it can keep me going for a while.

It would be possible, I think, to write some quite good sociology on country music. To look at just what stories are being told now, or have been told in the past. To see how closely some songs mirror larger social trends, or how they refute them. The stereotype of country music, in the playgrounds where I grew up, was that it was all the same: "My dog died, my woman left me, and my truck done rusted out." There's still a lot in the dead-dog-rusted-truck vein, and also a lot of the bog-standard plaintive romantic bullshit that manages to infest every genre short of deathcore, but the content of some of the other songs can be interesting. Two that I heard on the drive dealt with the issue of the domestic workload traditionally shouldered by women: one was from a serious perspective, a man wondering at the strength of his cancer-afflicted wife; the other was a humourous piece in which the narrator loses his job, decides to stay at home all day and sit on his ass while his wife works, then realizes how much work is actually involved in the running of a household.

Not deep stuff, by any means, but you wouldn't have heard men singing about that sort of thing twenty years ago. Does it represent a genuine shift in social awareness of gender roles, or just an attempt to pander to the (slowly) increasingly affluent female demographic?

Some undergrad should write a thesis on that.

(But not me).

No updates for the past week or so, but with reason. The flippant answer: I had better things to do. (The even more flippant answer: namely, my boyfriend).

More seriously, I spent the weekend driving down to surprise Caspian with a visit. It was a 15 hour drive there, just over 1400km. I left Sudbury early, 7am I think, and called Caspian from my cell phone when I had been on the road for about three hours, claiming to have just woken up. I had previously forged some excuse for being unavailable for most of the day - I said I was going down to spend the weekend at home, and that my mother and I were going to be in Toronto all afternoon and evening.

"Hey, love, I'm just hitting the road now, then my Mom and I are probably going to leave for Toronto as soon as I get to Barrie..."

"Will you call me when you get home, just to let me know you made it safely?"

Shit. "Um. Of course, love. I'll give you a call in about three hours."

So, I had to stop in the middle of Michigan to buy a phone card and find a payphone. (My cell phone doesn't work in the US, and I couldn't just call directly from a payphone because the area code would show up on caller ID, and I didn't want him asking awkward questions about where exactly I was calling from. But I figured routing the call through a 1-800 number would mask things well enough).

I got back on the road after that, and drove pretty much straight through, arriving at his house some time after 9pm local time. His car was in the driveway, but the place was dark. I let myself in the front door, which was unlocked, then tried the inner door: locked.

I knocked.

No answer, but a moment later, I heard his cell phone alarm go off, and heard him mutter unhappily as he turned it off.

I smiled, and knocked again.

"What?" He sounded sleepy and irritated and absolutely adorable.

I knocked again.

"Who *is* it?"

I was grinning ear to ear at that point, absolutely delighted with the entire situation. Finally, I relented, and gave him a reason to get out of bed.

"Are you going to let me in, love?"

There was a profound silence, then a sound of movement, then the door opened slightly and he was standing there half-dressed in the darkness blinking the sleep from his eyes. Then a moment later I had my arms around him and everything was right with the world.

He was appropriately surprised. And while it was too dark for me to actually see the expression on his face when I showed up at his door, the moment was still well worth the drive.

I had planned to only stay for a couple of days - drive down on Thursday, spend Friday and Saturday with him, leave Sunday. But on Saturday night he asked me to stay just a bit longer, and skipping my film class on Monday seemed like a very small price to pay for making him happy. (I'm sitting in the discussion period of that film class now, in point of fact; having missed the movie itself, I have nothing to contribute, so I am sitting quietly in the back with my disused laptop, updating Lokys instead).

The startling thing for me is how natural it feels to live with him. And, by extension, to live in America. Whenever I visit the US I usually feel a jarring sense of unreality: everything is just a little bit off from the way it should be. It's the small things, really. Stores have different names. I don't recognize half of the brands on the shelves. Cereal boxes don't have French translations on them. But this weekend, it all seemed... a bit unfamiliar, still, but not wrong the way it used to. I spent two months living in Milwaukee without that city ever losing its air of strangeness, but strolling around Caspian's town with him feels comfortable.

It feels safe.

I hadn't expected to ever really feel that way about anywhere in America. God knows I've spent enough time there on various vacations - my family used to go to North Conway, NH two or three times every year, visiting the same shops, eating in the same restaurants every time, but it was never more than a vacation spot. My parents have a timeshare in Florida; my mother averages two or three months per year there now. It's halfway to home for them, I think, they're comfortable there, but I never have been despite numerous trips down.

(Yet I'm planning to spend a week there with Caspian in February during my reading week, driving from Sudbury to Illinois to pick him up, then heading on down south to Florida over two days, and I find myself looking forward to it as much as I used to look forward to our New Zealand visits. And I don't even really like Florida, normally, but the thought of him being there too makes it infinitely more appealing).

Anyway. It was a wonderful weekend, I submerged myself with utter contentment into the domestic banality of grocery shopping and cooking and running errands. I made him French toast. He added me to his account at the video store when we rented a handful of DVDs. On Monday I went in to his office with him, and curled up on the Ikea loveseat in the afternoon sunshine with his copy of Tigana while he worked, and every so often he called me over to solicit my input on something.

I ramble about this sort of thing, but I can't help it: it's absolutely wonderful to me. I never in my life thought that I would even want a conventional relationship, much less actually find one. Me, a smiling housewife? My scowling rebellious 17 year old high school self would have glared around for something to gut like a fish at the mere thought. Even a year ago, my sociologically-trained liberal student iteration would have dismissed the notion as entirely too conventional, too plebian for me. But now, the greatest happiness in my life is just being with him.

Next update: the drive back; some musings about American radio; the Lake City Homestyle Cafe; fuck the UP, seriously.

But I do know the difference, now. In two ways, and I'm not sure which is worse.

First, of course, family. All my life, I've been close to them - geographically, if nothing else. I can count on one hand the number of times I've lived for more than a couple of months anywhere other than my parents' house: my year of madness at Trent, boarding with the Kraan family in Lindsay, living on my own for a miserable half-year. And now, residence at Laurentian.

I used to think I would be terrified of living on my own, having to deal with cooking for myself, cleaning, interacting with the inevitable suitemates or tenants downstairs or some other variety of neighbour other than the distant next door type I grew up with. This past summer, I thought I was looking forward to it: I already did most of the shopping and cooking for my parents by then, and was beginning to feel the looming threat of being trapped in that reverse role, having them depending on me more and more as time went by. Now, though, I'm actually here, and what I'm truly feeling is simple: I miss my family.

My relationship with them - especially with my parents - has transformed a dozen times over the years. When I was very young, I worshipped my father and was more than a little bit afraid of my mother; as I aged, I started to resent the amount of time my father spent away from home, while my mother became the provider of cookies and home-cooked chili on winter evenings; still later, I saw my father's vulnerability and his deep pride in both of his children, and I realized that my mother is probably the closest person in the world to me as far as temperament and sense of humour goes. These days, I mostly just accept the two of them for who they are. They're not perfect people, by any means. My mother's deeply ingrained racial sensibilities would make the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" blush with shame, and my father is entirely too willing to yield to her impulses in all things. They weren't perfect parents, either, and I'm not just saying that because they refused to buy me a Sega when I was a kid. But all things considered... I like my parents. They're good company. Being at home with them feels relaxing and comfortable and all the things that living at home should be. Until they move into a new house again, a part of me will always feel most at ease sitting in their living room in front of the fire with a good book in hand and Maggiecat in my lap.

So, that's one difference that I know and miss. It's bearable. Less than that, even: I always knew I would need to leave the nest eventually, and I think that they miss me more than I miss them, on average. I go home on weekends sometimes, I call two or three times per week, it's really not so bad.

There's another difference, though. Newer, and sharper, and if the absence of the comforting presence of my family is the emotional equivalent of the occasional dull ache of an old injury, this one is more like the shock of a sudden trauma.

I had long since given up on falling in love. Couldn't imagine what anyone else in the world could possibly see in me, and I had no intention of setting myself up for hurt by going looking. I wouldn't even have known where to start, anyway. Me, striking up random conversations with strangers? That's about as likely (and as pleasant) as being killed by tetanus after mishandling a rusty paperclip. I did my share of online flirtation because it was safe, and easy, and I thought that the sort of detached intellectual affection found there was as good as I was going to get.

Then came Caspian. And then, after a few months of something that wasn't quite the usual detached exploration, he drove 14 hours to meet me. And then, after a couple of hours of awkwardness, I felt like I had known and loved him all my life. Everything about him was just right.

He spent a week with me at the beginning of August, and then another week before the end of the month, and we stayed in my parents' house and I showed him my hometown and the few other places nearby that are special to me. I missed him terribly when he left, both times, but he had been a visitor. And we always know that visitors need to leave eventually, no matter how pleasant their company.

Then I went to spend a week with him, down in the States. Staying in the house he had to himself, helping him get his new studio set up, going out to dinner with him at the local pizza place. And it didn't feel like a visit; it felt like, well, home, of a different sort. Waking up next to him in the morning felt like the most natural thing in the world. Curling up on his couch with his head in my lap and watching Cowboy Bebop was, for that week, my definition of contented pleasure.

I'm glad I experienced that, of course. It was the best week of my life, and I wouldn't trade its memory for anything.

But December - our next scheduled visit - is a long way off. If I didn't know the difference, living alone would probably be OK... but I do, twice over. And of the two things absent from my life right now, I miss him the most.

Today was Remembrance Day here in Canada.

I'm never quite sure how to feel about that, what my reaction to the event should be. It's the fashion, these days - especially in sociological circles, remembering Professor Karzai's rants last year - to look down on the whole thing, to deride it as a glorification of war. Ego-stroking the military-industrial complex. Or to see the occasion as being faintly embarrassing, waiting for the hunched veterans to go by in their shuffling parade, listening to lisping schoolchildren recite poems.

It's impossible for my generation to fully understand the concept of a world war. 750,000 men died at Passchendaele. Five times the current population of my hometown, and Barrie is big enough now that it takes the better part of an hour to drive from one end clear to the other. When individual troops are killed in Afghanistan, their pictures are on the front page of the newspapers the next day. The memorial on Vimy Ridge bears the names of over 11,000 Canadian soldiers from World War I whose bodies have never been found. How can I, sitting warm and comfortable and safe, even dare to claim the right to judge the fallen?

I can't, of course. I don't. Last week I dropped my change in the collection kettle held by a veteran up at the mall, and claimed my poppy, and wore it until today. My father had one as well, on Saturday night, and he nodded his grave, quiet approval at mine during our family dinner. (No-one else was wearing one, that I saw. But what can you expect from a family of left-wing intelligentsia?)

I don't glorify war. I oppose the US occupation of Iraq, I don't really think Canadians should be in Afghanistan, and I have the civilian's suspicious contempt of the military in general - a feeling that war should be something we're beyond, as a species, that anyone who chooses military service as a career is either a borderline sociopath or just unqualified for any other work. Nor am I quite mature enough to see beyond the outer appearances of the veterans, past the shaking hands and age-dimmed eyes, to really appreciate the sacrifices they made.

What I remember are the faces, seen in grade school textbooks or glimpsed online while trawling military archives out of boredom. Those who died, and those who survived; photographs don't distinguish between the two. I remember being shocked, the first time I saw a service photo of a World War I soldier: He's handsome. I always feel instinctively that the human physical appearance has only improved over time, despite evidence to the contrary: I just can't think of people from fifty or a hundred years ago as being passionate, attractive creatures. I look at my own grandparents, with their sharp-edged affection, and I can dimly wonder at what a pair they must have made when they were in their prime - my grandfather must have been a giant in those days - but I can't picture it. When I see the clear, strong face of a soldier who was 20 in 1916, though, it becomes real. I suddenly *know* that he must have had a girlfriend at home, or maybe a fiancee, and his mother must have absolutely adored him, and he left that behind to sail halfway around the world to kill or be killed by men he had never even seen before, and millions of others did the exact same thing. Not all of them can have been especially brave, but they went, and they died by the hundreds of thousands. And a generation later, just as the world was starting to rebuild itself, their sons did it all again.

So, I remember them for that. They were young, and they were beautiful, and they were willing to give that up because they thought it was the right thing to do.

We will not see their like again.

I had my English - sorry, my Rhetoric of Fiction - class presentation today. It was supposed to be a fifteen to twenty minute examination of one rhetorical element within a short story, drawing on the text itself, our secondary theoretical sources (ie, the two course textbooks), and any additional scholarly criticism we felt like dragging in. By luck of the draw, my presentation date was November 7, my element for analysis was authorship, and the text I chose was Mark Twain's first popular short story, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

So, I sat down at my computer this morning at about 11am, and started researching and writing the material for the presentation. Well, I alternated between that and watching Top Gear clips on Youtube. Then I made myself a nice sandwich, pastrami on marble rye with sliced tomato. Then I got up and wandered around a bit, checked the mail downstairs, wrote a little more, assembled a ridiculous little plastic anti-aircraft gun, did a bit more research, revised the main direction of my argument, changed my shirt, wrote another page, called Caspian, hit print, then grabbed my presentation notes (two copies, one in MLA format with full references for the prof to mark, the other just the text in 13 point font at 1.5 spacing for me to read from) and was out the door at 4pm for my first class.

The presentation went very well, of course. Mine always do, and I say that with no arrogance intended. Giving class presentations seems to be the thing in the world I am least suited for: I'm an introvert to a crippling degree, I procrastinate, my research is seldom as thorough as it ought to be, and I am not an outwardly charismatic person. But I am absolutely great at presentations. I use humour often and well, I make eye contact with everyone, I speak and move in an animated manner, and my presentation itself is always smooth and logically organized and completely devoid of any "um, uh, so... where was I?" moments. I'm calm, I'm collected, I'm amused, I adapt easily to unexpected questions or events. Put me in a party with twenty of my supposed peers, and I will hide in the corner nursing a Diet Coke until I can leave. Put me behind a podium in front of them, and I'm completely comfortable.

There's no trick to it. I really don't have any explanation for why I do so well at public speaking of any sort. I don't picture the audience naked to relax my nerves, I don't memorize a speech word for word - my presentation notes are my speech, I just write out exactly what I plan on saying, read it over a couple of times to get the gist, then I keep the notes in front of me and glance at them every paragraph or so to remind myself of my next point. I improvise, too, adding in examples if I think of them, or expanding on a point if the class is looking glassy-eyed after what I thought was a perfectly clear explanation.

But the really neat thing about tonight's presentation, as far as I'm concerned, was this:

I don't know anyone in my English class. At all. None of my fellow Georgian transfer students are there, all of them have just been at Laurentian with each other for the past three and a half years. I think only one of them knows my name, and that's only because I sit beside her and we've talked online briefly.

But after my presentation, four separate people came up to me and complimented me on it. They said it was great, I was funny, I should be an English prof, they really enjoyed it. These are people who don't know me as anything other than the quiet one who sits up at the front, but after my presentation, they approached me privately and gave me honest, unsolicited praise.

That's pretty awesome, I think. I think I derive more pride from that than I do from any given essay mark. Writing a good essay is really just paint by numbers, filling in the blanks of the thesis and the main arguments. Being able to keep people entertained during a twenty minute discussion of authorial rhetoric, though... that's something special.

If T.S. Elliot had ever seen a Sudbury November, he would never have dared to call April the cruelest month.

There were whitecaps on Ramsey Lake today. Whitecaps, building up in about half a kilometer of open water surrounded by hills on three sides. It snowed, briefly - either that or I somehow shifted into bullettime and just saw some extremely slow raindrops drift down past my window. It is cold, and miserable, and everyone I see scurries around clutching their winter jackets tightly around their necks while simultaneously battling with umbrellas rendered useless by the wind.

As long as I'm actually outside in it, I'm fine. Bring it on, blow ye winds high-ho, I'll raise my head to meet them with my usual snarl of defiant delight. But sitting in my tiny, dingy little residence room, looking out my window at it, with none of my usual comforts to hand? There's the misery, for me. Here in West Res, Laurentian, there is no spa. There isn't even a bathtub. There isn't even a comfortable place to sit and read.

At home, when I wanted to curl up with a book, there were myriad places I could do so. I could soak in the aforementioned spa or tub, I could sprawl out on one of five perfectly comfortable couches, I could recline in my mother's leather easy chair, I could stretch out on my stomach on the big sheepskin rug in front of the fire, I could go upstairs to my own bright, spacious room, with its two big windows and its afternoon sun, and lie in bed.

Here, my bed is a mattress on the floor. It used to be a mattress on a hard wooden platform four feet off the ground, but I got tired of needing to look around for a ladder every time I wanted a drink in the middle of the night, so I moved it down. This had the advantage of freeing up the wooden platform for me to use as a base for my favourite hobby of stacking things on other things - my box pile is approaching epic proportions, and my textbooks are scattered liberally below the monolith like offerings to a cardboard god - and it's not like the linoleum floor is any harder than the wooden platform was. Still, it's a bit lacking in the comfort department, and utterly impossible to read down there. Couches? We have one, in the common area I share with my three suitemates. A fine piece, in the 1990s Second-Rate Rental Property Ikea Knockoff style, with a stiff straight back and inadequate cushions and wide flat wooden arms. There are chairs, too, identical to the couch but slightly narrower. They radiate indignance when I try to sit on them, as though mortified that someone has mistaken them for anything other than display pieces used to advertise the residence as "fully-furnished."

There is nowhere to read. There is nowhere to immerse myself in water - water, which I have lived within sight and touch of almost my entire life, I think I learned to swim before I learned how to ride a bike. We have a small shower. That's it.

I wasn't naive enough to expect luxury from a university residence. But on a night like this, when it's bleak outside and the lights across the lake are sparse and unfamiliar and weak through the rain, it's the simplest comforts of home that I miss. I'm not bothered by the cold, but I can't feel warm here, and that will be a hard thing in the months to come.

A Lokys update, after months - almost a year - of silence.

Who would have thought?

The plain and simple truth, though, is that I've missed this. Lokys has always seemed to go in cycles for me: there are times when I'm desperate to express myself (I remember spending stats class the morning after getting hit by that car typing out my daily entry in Notepad, then emailing it to myself so I could post it when I got home), but then there are times when the entire process seems like nothing so much as an onerous, thankless, entirely optional chore.

There's another complicating factor, too, which has to do with the quantity of writing. I thought, and still do, that I have a certain number of words in me per day. Once they've been expended, I'm all but mute, incapable of mustering the thought to compose a single cogent sentence. Living at home took a lot of words out of me; the simple interaction of talking to my parents about my day, the bustle of class, the letters written daily to my boyfriend. (I'll call him Caspian, here; it's not his name, but he likes his privacy, and it's an appropriate alias to use for him).

Now, however, it's November. A cold, wet November, in a cold and distant place, away from home and all its comforts. A strange place, filled with people who are unknown to me but have the advantage of long familiarity with each other. The classes are different, the students are different, and the words that once came forth easily from my lips now lie heavy on my tongue, unspoken, unsolicited.

It's not that I'm lonely, exactly. I remain curiously indifferent to the pressures of socialization. I am in constant contact with Caspian, I call my parents a couple of times a week; that suffices. I feel no need to seek out new friends from the ranks of the student body here. It just doesn't seem worth the effort, when I can walk to class gazing wide-eyed at the sky and the buildings and the trees, perfectly happy within myself.

But the sky and the buildings and the trees have no interest in my voice. I could sing to them, were I Orpheus, and the skyscrapers themselves would bend down to listen. But I'm not, I'm not even Eurydice, I'm just Kate. So, I cast my voice out instead, into this void, a fire of text upon the deep.

Will anyone still listen, after all these months?

Maybe not. I had a few regular readers, back in the day, but the day was a long time ago. Maybe I'll attract new ones. Maybe not. I won't know; this version of Drupal doesn't keep the same access statistics as the old. But I, at least, will be able to speak, and it doesn't much matter to me whether my audience is one or a thousand: here, I'm on the stage, and the light in my face blinds me to whatever shapes may be sitting in those distant balcony seats.

Still, I hope you enjoy the show.

My grandmother jumped early on the technology bandwagon, relatively speaking. She had a computer almost as soon as my family did, although she used hers for word processing instead of Wing Commander II. (It was still, however, a computer, which made it more entertaining than socializing with my family when I was young; I used to spend hours in the basement going through the WordPerfect special-character alt codes by trial and error while my parents and grandparents chatted upstairs. I was easily amused by all things electronic).

My grandmother never exactly mastered the concepts behind computers - file organization and management, updating software, installing and uninstalling programs - but she learned how to use WordPerfect and how to respond to emails and how to check cbc.ca. For a while, she hired a local computer technician - Dave, no last name that I ever heard - to tutor her and to fix whatever problems cropped up, but after spending more on him than she spent on the actual computer, she stopped and let things decay naturally for a while.

Then she started calling me, to fix various things. It was easy enough work for me: I got her off Internet Explorer/Outlook onto Firefox and Thunderbird, uninstalled a bunch of system-clogging software she never used, stuck in an extra 256MB of RAM from my old computer, and generally got her old Dell humming along as well as could be expected of a Celeron 1.3GHz.

Then, she decided that my grandfather should have a computer to type on. He's getting quite old, and finds it difficult to write things out by hand; when he speaks, he fumbles for words. She thought a basic computer - a glorified typewriter, basically - would let him get back into writing, which he used to enjoy. So, I helped them pick out a bottom-of-the-line Dell, and when it arrived, I got it all set up for them last Saturday morning.

When I tried explaining to him how to perform basic tasks like opening a word processor or saving a file, though, I was made very aware of the enormous gulf in comprehension that exists between someone who grew up with computers like I did, and someone who grew up with paper and pens. I remember using old UNIX workstations in the library at Codrington Public School, playing Offshore Fishing and some math dungeon crawl using a trackball. I've learned as I've gone along, but computers have always been part of my life, as familiar and omnipresent as math textbooks and calculators.

Not so for my grandfather.

"OK, so, to open the writing program, just move the mouse over to the left and double click on the Writer icon..."

As soon as I heard myself, I realized how strange it must sound to someone else. What's a mouse? Why is it called that? How do you move it? What's a program, and how is it different from Windows? How do you double click? All the questions laughed about on tech support humour websites ("CD player? I thought it was a coffee cup holder!") suddenly seemed to be less funny than they used to be. Not everyone understands computers the way those of us who grew up with them do. No more than I understand the workings of my car engine.

More later.