On Wednesday I pumped
up my back tire and used my new brakes for the first time while riding to the
food bank. The front ones seemed to work okay as well, without sticking, but I
guess I would need a longer ride to find out for sure. I was there in time to
be part of a line-up of smokers. Of course, all fourteen people ahead of me weren’t
smoking first hand but all of us were smoking second hand.
The talkative and friendly
thirty-something large woman who I see there almost every week surprised me
when she started having a conversation in perhaps Polish with an elderly
gentleman who was sitting by the door.
I got number fifteen and went home.
I checked online for my essay mark
that was supposed to have been posted on Monday and saw that it was finally
there. I got 68%, which is a C-plus for my essay on Nietzsche. This would be the
first time I’d ever gotten a lower mark on a second essay. My first one, on
Kierkegaard, received 72%. I think that my second essay is clearly better than
the first and so I arranged to meet my TA on Friday to haggle the point. I have
managed on previous occasions to argue myself up, but this means that I have to
stop preparing for my April 26th examination for a couple of days
and to focus on my dispute with his assessment.
When I got back to the food bank, at
about 13:40, I discovered that they’d called my number just before I’d arrived,
so I went inside and my number was called next.
The only choices on the first stack
of shelves were vanilla wafers, saltines, sesame snaps and some kind of Easter
lollipops that weren’t even chocolate. I’d taken the sesame snaps before and
found them to be extremely stale, with a strangely floral aftertaste. I took
the saltines. There was lots of pasta and rice on the next stack of shelves,
but I still didn’t need any of that. The same was true of the shelves with the canned
beans. On the last shelf there was a box of Apple Jacks, but I really didn’t
feel the inclination to eat mostly sugar for breakfast, so I passed on the
kids’ cereal.
In the cold section, Sue offered a
choice between bottles of flavoured water or three little 114-milliliter cups
of apple juice. Why is flavoured water even considered to be food? I took the
juice. She also had some of that spicy ranch dip that I’d gotten last time and
a few weeks before. I told her that I hadn’t even opened the second tub, but
there was also cream cheese, so I took that, and she threw in a couple of
single serve Danone yogourts. I didn’t need any bread this time so I walked
straight to the vegetable lady, who hadn’t been there for a couple of weeks.
There were potatoes, onions, tomatoes and sections of cabbage, but none of it
appealed to me, since I already had potatoes and onions at home. She asked,
“Don’t you want a few tomatoes?” I told her that they looked kind of soft. She
held out a handful of the slightly wrinkled red things to show me and argued,
“They’re really not, babe!” She seemed mildly disappointed in me when I turned
her down. It was the least I’d ever walked away with from the food bank.
I immediately rode down the street
to No Frills to buy some marked down chicken, some milk, yogourt and a few
bananas, hoping that the twenty dollars I had would cover it. It did.
On the way home I stopped at the
LCBO to buy a can of Creemore. I noticed that they’d uprooted one of the two
bicycle stands, because I guess there are just too many places to lock a bike
in Parkdale (he said sarcastically). There was a big bike with saddlebags
against one side of the stand and so I went to the other side. I propped by
bike against the stand and the other bike fell right over. It wasn’t even
locked. I picked it up and leaned it against the corner of the building. Whoever
owned it didn’t seemed to be inside the liquor store. I have on rare occasions
in my life forgotten to lock my bike, so maybe that’s what happened with this one.
I watched two episodes of I Love
Lucy.
In the first, Lucy read Ricky’s mail that told him to report to Fort
Dix. She thought it was a draft notice but it was just a formal military way of
confirming that Ricky would be doing a show there. Lucy began knitting socks
and preparing a going away party for him. Ricky interpreted that her behaviour
indicated that she was pregnant and planned a shower for her. As guests for
each surprise party arrived Lucy and Ricky kept on distracting one another and
putting people in the closet until the closet was stuffed.
In the second show, Lucy found out that Ricky was looking for Apache
dancers for his show. I was disappointed that they didn’t actually show a danse Apache in the episode.
And speaking of violence, I heard a ruckus
outside at about half an hour before midnight. I looked out and out in the
middle of the street in front of the eastbound streetcar stop; a guy was
punching another guy who wasn’t punching back. Then once the guy was down on
the tracks, he kicked him in the head. Then he shouted, “You tried to steal my
dog!” When the beaten guy cried, “I didn’t try to steal your dog!” one could
tell from his voice that he was drunk, possibly down and out and maybe he had
psychiatric problems. The guy who’d hit him might have been drunk, but if he
was it was certainly not to the same degree as the beaten guy. He went back to
the sidewalk where his dog and two friends were standing and then they walked
away. The beaten drunk man was still sitting in a daze in the middle of the
street. Some people came to talk to him and he continued to insist that he
didn’t try to steal the man’s dog. He said he loved dogs and was just trying to
help it. It was hard to know where this started, but the guy’s dog was safe and
the violence was clearly unnecessary. What an asshole! And what kind of
relationship does he have with his dog if someone could just come along and
lead it away from him?
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