Who Am I?

            On Sunday morning I got up feeling a little down. It happens from time to time. A sense of, “What’s the point?” but after yoga, once I started singing, it all melted away. That’s usually the way it works. My song practices seem to be a protective barrier that keeps depression away from the later part of the day, though that’s not why I do it.

            Later during practice though I had to deal with the frustration of my guitar going constantly out of tune in my intensely dry apartment. It got to a point near the end when it just wouldn’t go in tune at all. I was almost ready to go and buy a new guitar but sometimes that’s not the solution because often, better guitars are even worse at staying in tune. Tuning is especially difficult in a city like Toronto where it’s dry inside in the winter and extremely humid in the summer.

            My landlord came for the rent and the first thing he said was “Happy New Year!” I returned the greeting but feels odd being friendly with Raja after all the hassles I’ve had from him over the years. I asked him to unlock the red stepladder that he’d chained up out on the deck. For years it had been free and just sitting in the corner of the landing on the way to the third floor, available if ever we needed it. I have high ceilings and if ever a lightbulb goes out up there, if there weren’t a stepladder I would have to pile things on top of a chair to precariously stand upon. I thought I might get an argument from Raja but he said he’d unlock it and put it on the landing. He explained that he’d only locked it because someone in the building had put it outside and our next roof neighbours had stolen it.

I put the new rent amount in a sealed envelope and gave it to him but a few minutes later he knocked on my door to tell me the amount was wrong because I’d given him about $15 too little. I was sceptical because what he’d handed me back had two fives and I remembered specifically counting out one five dollar bill to go with the hundreds the twenties, the toonie, the loonie and the three quarters. I didn’t think that he was deliberately trying to rip me off but I thought he might have gotten my rent mixed up with someone else’s. He said that he’d found an extra five between two twenties. I shrugged and went to get him the correct amount. Raja was down on one knee in front of me with a box filled with hundreds of dollars in rent money on the floor to his right while I was standing in my doorway looking down at him. Benji came out of his apartment on his way out and he looked at us with puzzlement. I explained to him that Raja was worshipping me and making an offering.

I watched the second to last episode of the tenth season of Doctor Who. They’d landed on a spaceship that was so large that it would stretch from Toronto to Montreal. The ship was halfway into a blackhole and so time was different in different parts of the ship. Bill had a big round hole shot clean through her and she was taken away from the Doctor to a hospital in the lower part of the ship. She woke up having had her heart replaced by a mechanical one. She was befriended by a quirky old guy with a beard and long hair who got her a job mopping floors in the hospital. In her spare time she would watch the Doctor on the closed circuit camera as he planned her rescue, but the video barely moved because of how differently time moved in the part of the ship where he was. Ten years passed for Bill while it had only been minutes for the Doctor. Her friend agreed to help her escape but it turned out that he’d led her into a trap. She was taken to the operating theatre to be “upgraded”. The Doctor and Missy arrive and meet the man who’d betrayed Bill. He pulls off a mask to reveal that he is The Master, which was Missy’s previous incarnation before she regenerated as a woman. The Doctor finds Bill too late, as she’s already been turned into a Cyberman.

The night before that I watched an episode in which Bill encounters some Roman soldiers, one of whom has taken a fancy to her. She thought she was going to have difficulty explaining to him that she was a lesbian but he understood right away. He said, “Oh, you’re like Vitas over there, who only likes men. I’m normal. I like both men and women, but I think it’s fine that you’re so limited.”

Also on Saturday night I got a message from Facebook telling me that someone had pointed out to them that my name might not be real and so I had till January 13^th to prove otherwise. What’s weird is that I went through this with them at least five years ago. I scanned my identification and sent them a digital copy, so they should have had it on record. I wondered if it was a coincidence that they were giving me a hard time so soon after censoring one of my picture posts. I immediately took a photo of my U of T student card and sent it to them, along with a message of protest and a reminder that they should have my information on record. They didn’t block me from accessing my page, so I figured that was the end.

But on Sunday I got a message that the ID I’d sent them wasn’t enough. I had to send something else from their list. I angrily took a photo of my birth certificate and sent it to them with another message of protest and another reminder that we had done this a few years ago. This time they blocked me from accessing Facebook, but only for a few minutes. After that I got a message saying everything was fine and they wouldn’t bother me about it again. They probably said that last time too.