I'm Boycotting US Grocery Items

            On Thursday morning it had been twelve hours past a week since I'd injured my elbow in the fall from my bike. The wound is still tight but the black part seems to be very gradually shrinking and the long purple part is showing cracks with pink flesh behind them. During yoga, going up into the shoulder stand was not very painful and putting my weight on the elbow was a little less excruciating. The worst was still when I’m lying face down and I stick my arms under my belly before pushing my legs and hips into the air for the locust. Once I'm up it's not so bad but the starting position burns.

            I didn’t take a long bike ride that afternoon because I had to renew my loan of some books from the OISE library downtown, I also needed to buy pens and a writing notebook from Staples and go to the supermarket. If I’d done all that and taken a bike ride too I would have gotten home too late to comfortably make and eat dinner. I headed out at 17:00 into an extremely hot day. After reborrowing the French grammar exercise books I went down Queen’s Park to University and then to Staples. In front of the store and up the whole block there were ten free bike post rings in a row. That was spooky because even in the winter I sometimes have a hard time finding one that’s empty.

            The choices of colour of notebooks at Staples were very limited. All they had was red, green and blue. I've gotten black there before and even seen purple but none of those choices were anywhere to be found. I also prefer notebooks without lines but they had none. I got a 360 page blue spiral notebook and five fine-point pens.

            At Queen and Spadina a woman had a wool scarf wrapped around her neck.

            I stopped at Freshco to buy fruit and yogourt. I almost bought three bags of cherries but then I saw that they were from the United States so I got red grapes from Mexico and canned peaches from Greece instead.

            That night I watched the first episode of the third season of Dobie Gillis, which was marked as episode 5 in the file folder. The story opens with Dobie and Maynard suddenly being served honourable discharge papers from the army with the captain declaring that it’s a great day for the army and for all Americans. Maynard doesn’t want to leave and convinces Dobie that civilian life is a dead end for them but when they try to go back through the gate the guards pull their guns on them. Dobie decides that he wants to go to college and it just so happens that there is a tuition free college right in their home town, which conveniently for Maynard, requires nothing more than a high school diploma, so Dobie, Maynard and Zelda all enrol. Their high school teacher, Mr Pomfritt has also become a professor there. Dobie has trouble deciding on his courses so the entry clerk has him throw three darts blindfolded at a course chart, so he ends up with Russian literature, welding and fingerprint identification. None of those courses are featured in any subsequent stories though.

            In the second story, many rich female students at Dobie’s college have boyfriends that are enrolled at other colleges far away but they still want to have some kind of social life and so they hire the least desirable young man on campus, Maynard G Krebs, to be their date. Maynard starts to become a cad because of all the power and gifts they are giving him and sells himself out to the highest bidder until Dobie intervenes and works hard to cure his friend of his greedy addiction. The main devil that he has to fight against is the lovely Bernadine. Dobie wins and Bernadine’s boyfriend dumps her and so they fall for each other but Dobie has to give her up because otherwise Maynard will think that his efforts to save his friend were all an elaborate scheme to get a pretty girl.
            Bill Bixby, who later starred in The Incredible Hulk, had a small role as a campus big brother to Maynard.

            While I was making coffee, my landlord finally came after almost three weeks to take out the garbage and clean the halls. For the last month or so my chicken faucet handle has been broken. It works but it flops around and so I have to fiddle with it to get specifically hot or cold water. I told Raja about it and he said he’d install a new faucet on Monday.