Another One Bites the Gentrified Dust

            March 17- On Tuesday morning my sciatica is bothering me from all of the sitting I’ve been doing while working on my essay. My right buttock and hip is sore and I don’t feel like I can sit but I have to for the next few days to get this done.

            I worked from 7:00 to 10:30 and went to sleep for 40 minutes. I worked until 17:00 and went to sleep for an hour and fifteen minutes.

            In the late afternoon I was at the longest I’d ever gone past an official essay deadline. It was a good thing I’d been given a one-week extension. I don’t think I would have this problem with an English research paper because the information is all very familiar and second nature to me. With Indigenous Studies there is a lot more data to process.

            I worked until midnight having shaved my notes down to ninety pages. There were eight more pages left to skim through before tackling the whole set of notes all over again. I had to decide which ones support my argument.

March 18- On Wednesday morning my hip was still sore from sitting for so long every day for so many days in a row. On top of that I was weaker than usual because I was fasting. I was hoping I could have this paper written and uploaded by Thursday at midnight. My TA said I could have a week but I really wanted this essay out of my hair so I could get on with my life.

            I worked on the paper and then went to sleep from 11:30 till 13:00.

            I laboured some more and went to sleep from 16:30 to 18:15.

            By midnight on this day of going through my notes I’d only managed to chip the paper down from 89 to 69 pages. But this was my second time through the notes and it was slower going because I was eliminating information that I’d decided to keep in the first round.

            I hadn’t had song practice since Sunday and this is the longest I’d gone in years without playing guitar and singing. It looked like it was going to be longer because I didn’t think I could finish this essay until well into the weekend.

           

March 19- On Thursday morning I was almost halfway through my fruit fast and for the first time I felt normal and not so weak and spaced out. That usually happens for a while after the body adjusts to a fast. My hip felt better as well except when I lifted it off the floor in a backward bend.

I worked until noon and then went out to go to Freshco and stock up on more tomatoes and avocadoes. Outside the building Benji was pacing up and down in front of the papered windows of the storefront that used to be Coffeetime. He explained that he had nothing to do and all day to do it. I thought that all the Tibetans that used to sit at Coffeetime must be crowding with all the other Tibetans who sit at Tim Hortons but Benji said they’ve temporarily removed all the chairs at Tim Hortons so there’s no one sitting there. He mentioned that the little donut shop called Jason’s that was one block west of Lansdowne had also closed down. He lamented that soon there would be no more coffee shops left in Parkdale. I suggested that maybe someday we’d be able to download our coffee.

I bought bags of unripened avocadoes but I forgot to buy single ripe ones and so I had no avocadoes to eat.

            I dreamed had a new girlfriend who was a very big black woman and she was also a cop. But she didn’t act like a cop. She was very exuberant, generous and friendly. She gave me a bag of gourmet food, which included something that I thought were sardines but they were rectangular. I had one but I don’t recall the taste. I didn’t want them all and decided to hang them up. The people I was living with in a small space had a lot of little hooks in the wall for hanging things. I complained that there were too many of them.

            The guys putting in the ceiling downstairs knocked my Kramer guitar over. A little after I'd righted it the vibrations of the big screwdrivers almost tipped it over again.

            I tried to take a siesta from 17:00 to 18:00 but I couldn’t sleep and so I got up at 17:30, feeling rested nonetheless.

            By 18:51 I’d finished the second sweep of my notes and grated them down from 69 to 52 pages. I began the third sweep of my notes, which involved a lot more rearranging of bits of information, and so there was a lot of jumping around back and forth through the essay.

            I worked until 22:30 and managed to knock my notes down to 43 pages but my brain was too tired to continue and so I went to bed early.