After class on Wednesday I went home and went immediately to bed because I had to work later and didn’t want to fall asleep while posing. I didn’t sleep, but I rested for an hour and when I got up I had a quick lunch of a bowl of chipotle crisp thins and some yogourt.
I worked for Diane Pugen at OCADU.
This was my last booking of the year. Diane didn’t arrive for the first ten
minutes but I started posing anyway because I know that she likes it when I do
that. I did mostly short poses.
Two of her students gave slide
presentations and so I had some time to work on my journal with my laptop. My
laptop seemed to crash though and it wouldn't restart until I realized that I
was trying to restart it with the usb memory stick plugged in. Once I pulled
the flashdrive out my laptop started and I discovered that what had happened
was that the wall outlet that I had been using was dead and my battery had run
out of juice. I used another plug and got it working again.
The students that gave their
presentations looked about 19. Each of them gave a talk on a particular artist
of their choice. One of them featured an Asian artist who does paintings
inspired by anime horror and one of the paintings he showed depicted a bloodied
young female in a school uniform as a monster is menacing her. Some of his
young female classmates questioned his choice of artwork.
The second presenter was a young
woman who showed the work of a painter that shows people in the process of
dissolving. As part of her explanation of the meaning of his work she talked
about the fact that she is bisexual and she has been able to come out to her
mother but would be afraid to do the same to her father because of the opinions
she has heard him express about homosexuality being a mental illness.
It was dark as I rode home but I had
my flashers on. I almost got doored at Spadina by a hulking chunky brute in a
TTC uniform who was getting out of the passenger side of a car. On top of that
he just walked slowly in front of me for a few meters instead of stepping
directly to the sidewalk. I called out to him, “You almost doored me!” but he
either ignored me or didn’t hear or didn't know I was talking to him.
On Queen Street at rush hour there
is a narrow space to ride a bike between the driving cars and the parked cars.
I was considering stopping at the supermarket on the way home but it was very
cold and I couldn’t think of anything I needed more than to step into my too
warm apartment.
Just past Ossington, suddenly a guy in a blue Subaru WRX with a spoiler opened
his door and I slammed hard into it. My flasher went flying and the casing
broke so it wouldn’t reattach to my bike. I don't think that I fell but my
front wheel was extremely twisted and bent out of whack with my headset. The
wheel would not turn. The guy got out of his car and said, “This wouldn’t have
happened in Niagara!” I assumed he was from out of town. I told him, “You
wrecked my bike!” He was more concerned about the fact that the impact had
damaged his door and now he couldn’t close it. Then he started blaming me and
saying that I wasn’t supposed to be going so fast. I told him there were
cyclists passing me and besides there is no “going too fast" for a
bicycle. The point was, I told him was that, “You are supposed to look back
before you open your door!” He claimed that he’d looked in his mirror but
hadn’t seen me because I was going too fast. I moved my broken bike in front of
his car as he fiddled futilely with his door but he couldn’t close it. I told
him he was going t have to pay for my bike repairs and give me $50. He kept on
saying that I hadn’t been careful. Finally he told me to call whom I had to
call. I figured 911 would not be appropriate and so I called 311. The Toronto
city services desk transferred me to police communications. I told the person
about getting doored and gave him the license plate number, which was “CHFB
635”. He asked if I was injured and I said that I wasn’t, though I found out
later that I actually was. He said that they wouldn’t sent a car unless I was
injured and so he took my phone number and told me to exchange information with
the driver.
When I asked the driver for his name he refused to give it and just said
that he would give me the $50.
It seems he was meeting with his girlfriend at Starbucks. She asked me
if I was okay. He fiddled with his door for another ten minutes or so and then
backed his car a few doors east so it was in front of Starbucks. While he was
moving his car I heard a crunch and saw that the yellow reflector from my front
wheel had come off and he’d just crushed it. He said he would get me my money
but I stood outside in the cold for another ten minutes before he came out and
handed me ten $5s. He said, “Sorry for the inconvenience!”
I had to walk my bike home vertically while balancing it on its back
wheel from Ossington and Queen. A few guys commented sympathetically on my
twisted wheel as I walked. I stopped and told one guy that I’d made the driver
give me $50. He said, “Next time, a buck fifty!”
It
took me about half an hour to get home and so the accident had knocked an hour
off my evening. I realized once I was settled in that I’d actually been
slightly injured after all. I guess the impact with his door had bruised my shinbone.
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