Spock

            The heat was on full blast when I got up on Monday morning but when I opened the window the wind blew the frigid air directly into my room. The only way to balance out the heat inside and the cold outside was by closing the window to a knife edged crack.

            Because it was the 15^th of the month I had to send in my income report to social services, so I went online and printed my pay statement from OCADU. I filled out the form, put everything in the postage paid envelope and put that in my backpack.

            Since I was wearing my last clean pair of un-ripped briefs, it had to be a laundry day. It would be the first time I’d be washing the khakis and the wool socks that I bought on Boxing Day so I went online to see if there were any special instructions to keep them from shrinking. The pants are 98% and 2% spandex, so people generally advised that they shrink in the dryer but stretch out again when worn. So the caution for both items was to wash warm but not dry too hot. I think most people just put a few items in the dryer at a time, whereas I put everything in and though I put it on hot, I suspect that, because so many clothes are in one machine together, they cool each other off so that, even if I’ve got it on high it’s like drying at a lower temperature. I splurged and spent $2 on washing my sweatpants by themselves in cold water. The last time I’d washed them in the sink in cold water and then tried to dry them in the machine at low temperature but it was like no drying had taken place at all. This time the spin cycle from the washer half-dried them anyway and I just took them home and hung them up until they were fully dry.

            The older guy that manages and perhaps owns the Laundromat is Korean, I think. I nodded a greeting to me for the first time in the years that I’ve been coming there. I heard him saying something about being attacked there recently by a Chinese guy. He added that some of his customers have stooped coming, “But I don’t care!”

            During the wash cycle I rode down to the No Frills at King and Jameson to see if there was any better fruit available than what I’d gotten from Freshco the day before. Their 88 cent sale was going on, which meant that I got a t-bone steak, a kilo of caviar and one of the cashiers, all for 88 cents each! Just kidding. It was just that a lot of items had prices that ended in .88, but they were marked down a little more than that on the dollar side as well. I got Becel margarine at $1.88, a half pint of raspberries at the same price and red grapefruit were three for $1.88 so I got six. I splurged on a mini watermelon for $2 and I also bought sea salt and old cheddar.  When I was buying these items I noticed a nearby, but out of reach from where I was, section had large cans of Maxwell House coffee for $4.88, so after I’d put everything in my backpack I went back into the store and got a can. It doesn’t get cheaper than that.

            I had been following the incident about the little girl that had said that someone had come up and clipped her headscarf with a scissors but it was revealed by the police that the story was not true. The backlash against an 11-year-old child on right wing social media was horrifically appalling. Up until today I’d only thought these people that follow pundits like Ronny Cameron were merely ridiculous, but their reactions and comments consisted of often grotesque bullying because they believed the kid was an equal player in some elaborate Muslim plot to make Islamophobia worse than it is. The ironic thing about that is that if this had really happened it would have been the least violent hijab attack that’s ever been reported. Also the notion that the lie was made up by adults that were controlling her is also bizarre because if adults were to make up a hijab attack there would have been violence injected into the lie to match that which has accompanied actual attacks, such as screaming, name calling, spitting, punching, grabbing and ripping. By contrast, the little girl’s made-up story was surreally innocent: a weird Asian man in glasses, sneaking around with a clicking pair of scissors to snip off little bits of a girl’s headscarf. Only a child would have made up such a non-violent and cartoon like fantasy, so I doubt very much if she was coached.

            I watched the sixth episode of Star Trek Discovery. There are some interesting connections with the original series. The lead character, Michael Burnham was raised by the Vulcan ambassador and his wife, Amanda Grayson and so she is the foster sister of Spock. According to the nerds who follow these things closely, Spock would be 26 years old at the time of the Discovery events and he would be serving as science officer for Captain Pike on the Enterprise. This is ten years before the first original Star Trek episode. There is a flashback to when Michael Burnham was the first human to apply to enter the Vulcan academy. But the academy gave Sarek a choice: either to let his half human son, Spock, enrol or to let his foster daughter, Michael. He chose Spock and so Michael had to settle for Star Fleet Academy. But when the time came, Spock rejected the Vulcan school and chose Star Fleet as well. Take that Sarek!