Friday, 17 February 2017

High School Dance Band



            It seems to be on the coldest mornings that it’s extra hot in my apartment because it just causes the thermostat in the hallway to jack the heat up higher. I think that even opening the window above the radiator just blows the rising hot air deeper into my place.
            Since Wednesday was the fifteenth I had to send in my income report to Social Services, so I went onto the OCADU website and printed up my pay statement. It’s nice that the site has gotten rid of most of its glitches, though it still temporarily registers an error after I log in and I always have to confirm that I’m an employee rather than a student.
            At around midday I headed out to the bank. There was a three-person line-up and a bicycle crowded around the Bank of Montreal ATM so I waited outside on the sidewalk for the space to clear up. Some people spend a lot of time doing all of their deposits and withdrawals at the machines when there is no line-up inside of the bank where there’s a free teller waiting who can do it for them twice as fast. There was this one guy that seemed to be doing just that. He kind of looked like the rickety old girl’s bike in the entryway was his but when he finally left the bike was still there. The woman with the big dog jumping happily up at her was next, but she didn’t take as long. The bike wasn’t hers either. The last woman didn’t look like the bike was a match for her either and it wasn’t. I came in and leaned my bike against the machine just as a guy that was moving like he perhaps had Parkinson’s disease came out of the bank and got his bike. He warned me to watch my back as he did a u-turn to get out. I guess having a bike with no crossbar is easier to get onto for someone with movement issues.
            I could have used a couple of things at the supermarket but they weren’t necessities, so I just stopped at the liquor store to get my Wednesday can of beer and went home, to work on updating my journal.
            I watched an episode of Leave It To Beaver in which a girl that is attracted to Wally uses a fake friendship with Beaver to manipulate a get together with Wally so she can get him to ask her to the school dance. The weird thing is that Beaver’s mother approves of the manipulation because trickery is the only way that girls can get the attention of boys. No girl ever tried to pull any strings to get with me in high school. I asked two girls to school dances twice when I was a teenager. The first time the girl from one grade up accepted my request a month before the dance. The thing was though that I was too shy to talk to her at school so I never approached her or called her at all as the event approached. So when I finally called her to make arrangements to escort her she told me she’d already made plans with someone else. For another dance I asked Leanne Forsythe, a girl in my grade ten class, if she would go with me and she said that she would. When I mentioned it a day or so before she said, “Oh! I thought you were kidding!”
            I remember the band that played most of our school dances was The Common People. They did mostly Creedence Clearwater revival covers but they also did Yellow River by Christie, which I was very fond of at the time and quite a few other popular tunes. I discovered online that they are still together. 

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