| the golden west volume 15 part 1 - 1998 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver, 1st August 1998 Can I think with this motor next door, the duct-cleaning van. Beautiful creation - the hand page is shockingly beautiful. Now the mouth page is too. It says in english: collected writing 1974-1996. That was today. It's entered. It's mostly edited. There are Pagemaker versions of some of it, which I can set up for printer release properly paged, spaced, kerned, tracked. I need small notes on each. Then there's the journal, with photos - 5 In Photoshop yesterday working with scans of those little squashed aluminum figures noticing the way not the shape but the attitude of the figures changed when I changed the shape of the frame around them. Something as if emotional. They held themselves differently. 7 Friday, Saturday, Sunday - rewrite the land and community paper, which is weak and incoherent as is. Yesterday finished putting the last long paper into Word from typewritten pages, text recognition scanner. I'm sorry there's nothing to say. It's work every day. There's nothing new. I'm falling silent here, just an ignored worry about where I'll find enough money. Another one about being hated throughout the neighbourhood. The stress with Tanya is an arm of my war with T and R. Trudy has bad-mouthed me wherever she can. I feel it in someone's changed way of saying hello. Oh well. Write off another one. It's the women it works on. I don't feel it with the men, gay or straight. And then there's evidence of the places it has to be just my fault. Call it crossing off connections. Or call it having ended up like my dad, though I feared it and tried to avoid it. A blind contemptuous manner - is it? - that doesn't know it has offended. And yet, when I see how Louie makes people like her - her fawning tone and the way she hides her brilliance except in its flattering excellence of attention to the other person - I refuse the means. I wouldn't like being liked in that way. You don't kow-tow, Muggs said. I liked it that she saw it that way. What's gained by the fight, is the question. I know the answer - what's gained is the way I can stand my own ground in all my kinds of work. So I have the work, but the giving and receiving of it is very hampered. That's unchanged. - All day rewriting. I'm getting it. I found the place in the original where it goes incoherent because I skipped something I didn't have the nerve to say among those guys, because it was about them, the postmodern preacher-men. I didn't deal with the men of the church I was in. That's why I found myself irritated and sniping. This time say it out. I blurred it in the outline and then lost it in the speech. No wonder I was frightened. Sorry, Tom, I was blaming you wasn't I - 8 Sunday night. Car washed, hair washed, laundry done, red running shoes drying on the window sill back to back. Leaving the land revised and on disk ready to send tomorrow. Stuff in Rowen's room to pick up and sort, but not tonight. There's that harridan two buildings over - she and the old man yelling the way they have once a month since I've lived here. What could I say about her voice. I've never seen her. Her voice is a tight, squashed, cartoon voice, a kind of quacking, irredeemable ruin. In the laundromat in a year-old copy of L'Actualité, a piece on Marguerite Duras written a year after her death. Photos of her house, her son. "Duras s'est brouillée avec beaucoup de monde. Elle pouvait être dure, injuste, méchante." "Il se trouve que j'ai du génie, j'y suis habituée maintenant." 13 We were walking toward the condo and there was Ed on the balcony, old and stricken. Hi! This is Tom! I said. He was peering down as if he couldn't see us. Hi! It's me! I was wearing my blue shirt, a bright blue patch on the pavement. Oh, it's you. I didn't recognize you. So slow, so dull and grey-faced. He liked singing in the men's choir but he's had to give it up. They were performing in a concert. He fainted. Pitched straight forward down the steps. The Epps are like that, if they can't do one thing they'll give up on everything else, Mary said. She had got us off by herself, walked us to the library to see the Mennonite quilts, a little pony in her white bush hat, plodding forward, bushy grey forelock, white cotton socks. As soon as she had us to herself she asked questions, bustling along under the strong hot sun showing us the new civic center. Tom acquitted himself, in his new clothes, new Nikes, new watch band, new wallet. Me in my floppy old linen pants, red sneakers, washed-out bright blue batwing shirt, bemused at having been given five thousand dollars that will carry me through the last five months of my book. Very startled (looking at Ed) to see how old I could be in twenty-five years. The poor old thing sunk into the couch blinking at Tom out of suspicious little eyes. Poor old shabby skull. He's thin. He's so spiritless he couldn't find a single redneck insult. He sat there drooping. Paul and Cathy just stopped by to do their laundry and use a bed, he said pettishly. "We don't need that" (a modem). "The potatoes aren't cooked." Tom in the motel bed in Harrison Lake last night had his west wind face, his zephyr eyes. There's a shimmer in that one, a silver flux. An intimacy, where it starts to scare him - there. I'd been complaining, very carefully. You know how to do it, why don't you do it more often? You could have me eating out of your hand with gratitude. You can't be bothered. What did he say - some version of it's hard for guys. I notice I'm angry till we get there. What else since Monday. My back was better after I lay down with Tom. Paul, Luke and Tom and I in the kitchen sitting on more chairs than there usually are in that room. Paul in the green chair with his right ankle on his left knee, a stout man with fine black hair thinning in two peaks. A thin greying beard. A nose whose tip pulls down and takes a leftward turn like the nose on a Sepik River mask. Bright small eyes. Very presented and sophisticated, Tom said. Sly. Luke tall and clean in a new white teeshirt with Mexico in bright colors, the lower half of his face strangely swollen. He on one side of the table, I on the other. Tom on a chair. I was giving all of them openings and they were taking them. It was a graceful hour. Five in the afternoon. Just now an Indian named Tom, glasses, long thin braids, very earnest, with a strange second man, beagle-faced, with stiff thin red hair to his shoulders. Keepers of the sweat wanting a spot in our blackberries. We sat on the edges of the compost boxes, where we had been balancing on two-by-fours looking into the thicket. Tom said he'd had to apologize to his daughters. Did you apologize to your ex? Yes. I said when they've paid membership fees to Muggs they can have the combos, and will they take responsibility for keeping the underbrush clean. And will he come to the next meeting and tell us about it. And just now, Nathalie talking about the Santa Fe Institute, Gell-Mann, her work. The way she wakes up lonely. We figured out it's that, the moving-on of work. 14 Friday morning. Here it is, brilliant beautiful nine o'clock. I'm thinking about the website and the sweat lodge. 'Thinking about' means suggestions are coming to me. Ask them to plant cedars wherever they clean out garbage. Plant growth wherever there has been dereliction, and then look after it. Robins, red-winged blackbirds, wrens, house sparrows, cedar waxwings, tits. Working all day to get more stuff into html. 15 Tuesday morning on the way to the chiropractor Tom and I at Granville Island threading through the crowds, come upon two street musicians in front of the French bread place, father and daughter playing violins over a recorded orchestra. Vivaldi. He was East European, that tight intense smoked look of a gypsy man, anxious and tyrannical. She was Canadian, a small queen, slightly plump, jeans and teeshirt, light brown hair in a ballet bun, seventeen maybe. Anachronistic dignity. He was playing dramatically, to the crowd. He'd given himself the solo part though it was beyond him. She stood and moved in a way that was nothing but music, very perfectly. There was something about the way she faced the crowd, which had formed a wide circle. She was more alone than he was, she had more concentration. She was having to deal with what was sloppy in his playing. They were standing in different continents. I'm not sure I've got it. Her music was very strong. We came round the circle and stood behind them. I was looking at the motion of her haunch, feeling something about the economy and precision of the whole body's production of a line of music when that is all it's doing. I looked up and saw a woman on the far side of the circle who had been watching me watch her. Monday night I woke at three crying. You don't love me any more. Do you know how I know, you don't want to kiss me any more. Wednesday morning you did what you never do. It got us into a perfect little fuck. - Peter liked Leaving the land. He said I was always like that. strong. He liked the tone and cadence. And the argument. He was moved, he said. - At that moment Val of Val and Sue. They liked it too, she says shyly. I say they're in it. She says she'd hoped so. She liked the land base in a puddle on asphalt. Val again. Her poet friend likes it. 16 Integrity of the creator, Peter said. I'm thinking of the Salish dreamers' taboos - a certain kind of person will honour inner instructions to avoid acts or substances other people find harmless. I have been like that, fighting to obey rules I don't know the use of. It has to do with preserving access. These days I am negotiating with my own rules. My book/process helps me with that, because I'm not in a position to know whether taboo and emotional damage are different things. Tom's demon - the one who knows that certainty has to be harrowed. Creator certainty and ego defense have to be sorted. Is that correct? Yes. If you honour your taboos you go to the heart of your gift. If you ignore them you live as an ordinary person. Creator taboos are always in conflict with what you need as an ordinary person. If you obey them absolutely you'll die. That creator certainty is a relation to your gift, not to staying alive. So there always has to be negotiation. I haven't always understood that. The difference between creator taboos and emotional stops, it says, is that emotional stops are unconscious. If you release the emotional stops your aliveness can look after itself in the face of your creator taboos. You need great freedom when you have great discipline. 17 Rowen last night pacing in the kitchen wanting to talk about destiny. Pacing on his long flat narrow duck feet. I took him through the free will month of Philosophy 100 in five minutes. He got everything in a flash. Multiple causation, outside intervention, agency. I asked him to define will and he said mind. I said add motivation and energy. He was radiant. What's the next section - god, I said. I don't want to talk about god, he said. That's the right answer, you've got that section too, I said. What's next. Personal identity. I tell him the story of the accidental double stepping out of the beam. They're the same person, he says, for all of the reasons. Alright, that's the course. I'm impressed. Rowen gets dropped off by Annie and her brother. A big very dirty pack. Dirty clothes, long dirty fingernails, hideous second-hand shoes. First we'll citify you. Bath, nailclippers. Wear your flipflops. 18 The turns, from being at ease to being lost. Trying to work with my pages in Composer. It takes me all day to get it, and then there is the bus ride in agony in the evil air of new plastic seats and whatever else it is about buses. A cloud of apprehension about the postdoc application. A letter from Tom that ran on thick and fast about what he ate and the plot of a thriller. Now the thudding of drums in the park. Not enough time in the morning to feel anything through. Rowen writing a paragraph every morning, working through spelling mistakes in the evening. I showed him algebraic equations and graphs. I'm writing this for the record. And say how he looks in his grey cords and rugby shirt, sleek flop of hair and bright brown skin. With his hands in his pocket he's collegiate. But just now he called me from the bath to bring his little action man. 19 It's 4:30. So quiet. I woke with a tight solar. What is it. It's the postdoc. (Yes.) It's having to ask Paul [Churchland] to have me. It's like begging my father for money. Don't talk about it like that, she says. Say showing someone what you've done. I always have confidence in my work. But I think people won't value it. You think they won't want you for another reason, she says. Yes that's it. It's why I've been poor all my life. There's the crux. A crucified feeling. Jedes Häuschen hat zein Krëutschen. Dear universe, if there's something to learn I'm willing to learn it. If there's something I should do, I'll do it. Is it over? Was it that I had to feel the quality of it as what it is? (Yes.) 22 Patricia's party. I didn't hang back. I mingled responsibly. I plonked myself next to Donna at the end of the evening so she'd have an opportunity to offer me a job. I said the word limp out loud. I sat next to a man who had come with a remarkable, puzzling baby. The baby looked very small but not young. It looked like a fairy child. It had longish white hair and proportions like a grown person, a small head, small definite features, spidery white arms and legs, but it moved like a newborn, very weakly. How old is this person? I said to the father. Mindlessly. I hadn't figured out there was something wrong with it. He said "fifteen months" in a tone that said he was annoyed to be asked. I said "wow" and left it. He forgave me later. There was a woman with a pile of dull red hair who's an audiologist at Children's Hospital. She said that when children who have lost their hearing are given cochlear implants, they will report, after a first week, that speech sounds synthetic. But soon they will be hearing normally. Their cortex will construct from minimal cues. Yesterday Rowen was sick and lay in a bed on the floor of the sunny kitchen while I hand-sewed at the table. We were listening to Dr Laura together over Tanya's thumping. I've never noted a kind of dream I have as I'm falling asleep, in which I try to reason out some completely fictional circumstance. I'll sometimes wake enough to realize the problem doesn't exist, I don't know such a person or place. In such a dream, part of the brain is asleep and part awake. Twenty-four hours of war with Tanya yesterday. She had her thumping music on six hours. At the end of such a day, when I lie down to sleep, my solar doesn't stop quaking. - La Jolla Light. Expert gardener will housesit/caretake. Visiting scholar at UCSD Oct 98 to April 99. Home garden nationally published. eepp@ucsd.edu. 604-253-9618. 23 I'm fidgeting, nervous, things to do that I'm not doing, hanging out, sewing because I can keep company with Rowen while I do that. Missing Tom, antsy. "Smell of a man can keep a woman happy, study shows." A breakdown product of testosterone. 25 Pressure. I'm having to accelerate quickly, from sweet Photoshop summer to the kind of high smooth detailed sophistication the postdoc application will need. Rowen's cough is like an attack - a blow in my chest. And the way he calls me 'Mother' in that (I feel) hostile formal way. The way he is hanging around being sick. The grimace of a smile he thinks I need. 26 Oh, the war. So stressed yesterday. A tight heart. Taking Rowen to M's in Clearbrook, a van pulling into the right lane, a thistle field of old Mennonites looking up from their tables at the lunch center, Louie's hunt through Po Co interchanges for the Sony plant, and then Tanya's music last night through the night keeping me awake, were all much too much. Sandra this morning. She was talking about bear dreams and I of bull dreams. We mutually realized quite a lot. She saw my bear meeting with Rob as a finish to the story of the fast. (Chief Rose gave me a salmon.) I talked about my bull dreams for the first time to someone who understood what kind of child has that sort of fear. I'm hesitating what to call it. - So strong a sense of symbolic force, but what does that mean. You were talking to the audience, she said. I said after a while, after we'd searched it through, bear is true power of the mother overlaid with cultural power of the father. She said, That's it. She said her mother when she was dying said, "You and your father's wills were too strong for me." I didn't like that. I said so, but then I got it: "She didn't get to the bottom of it before she died. It was someone else whose will was too strong for her." Then Sandra dissolved. "I didn't know, I didn't know. I didn't know I felt that. I've been so guilty. I couldn't have gone on without this." She was gasping. I was remembering the story of the bear who carried love girl to her husband / and was her husband / and was the missing mother. I told her with tears in my eyes that I had stood in Presentation House as the little girl speaking up in church where she was forbidden to speak in any but words given to her. I said how afraid I was. She was too, she said. The meeting went on a little too long and she ran aground on fear - I think - but it was extraordinary work. Cashing M's check this morning, phoning it through, picking Rowen up from the bus station, errands - having money to do what needs to be done, taking Rowen to the Comic Shop, buying us supper, driving home in evening light on the False Creek foreshore, heart crucifixion is over for now. Beautiful letter from Tom. Go girl. I bought Ro's birthday and Christmas presents with the fifty I got from Terry Dawes for putting the first three sections of Brain and imagining into his program brochure. 28 Here I sit. The day is brightening at the window. What could I tell about today. Going to David Birch for help with packing Paul's bench. We rolled it into cardboard on his asphalt forecourt. He was in a beautiful state. I looked at him with pleasure. His eyes filled because I said I was going away. There was his bed on the floor of the enclosed front porch of his basement warehouse, a narrow foam with a sheepskin, where he lies in the aisle between lumps of furniture stacked to the high ceiling. A window above the door he removed for night air from the alley. He bends his knees to hug me head on, bony thin thing. His spirit is light as a shaving, his hesitancy is saintly sometimes. He wants the other to have every chance. All day I've had nothing to do, I've stayed near the blue of the sky. Luke took Rowen to see airplanes taking off and then to Kits Pool. Came in broadshouldered and brown in a baseball cap. Rowen standing next to him at the door, thin legs, paddle feet, big new teeth with new scalloped edges. 30 Sunday evening, counting. Rowen got in a car this morning. And drove away home. I went to the work party feeling a melancholy ache I thought was about the garden, and then I remembered it was about Rowen leaving. 2nd Sept What I've done since Ro left - paid local bills, had car fixed, found Anne Muir and got the tripod from her, found yam gel on Davie Street, answered all personal mail (from years back), paid Bright and dark debts, emailed Leaving the land to about twenty people, cleaned out cubbies and pantry, cleaned out back room, got boxes from the LCB, ran classified ad, organized all the parts of the G&F application (transcript, Phil's note), drafted memo for the grad office, bought maps at World Wide Maps and Books, hand-ordered Ungerleider xeroxes, songbird event board meeting, bought squared paper and fineliner pens, cleaned up greenhouse and around, revised Leaving the land, talked to Eric at the NFB, registered and paid fees for two terms, dropped keys and envelopes at Cineworks, got a copy of Kathleen's evaluation from Phil, enquired at the grad office about this and that, wrote Cheryl, came upon Gillian Slovo talking about her dad on CBC, xeroxed Smalley, made and erased to-do lists, talked to Nicole about Jojo's rose bush. Is that it? Enraged the librarians today by doing email discretely at a library terminal, hurt Jim's feelings by mailing him the piece he's named in. Lost half an inch off my waist, transcribed phone numbers and email addresses into a new journal. Here I stop and look at Leaving the land: perception and fantasy to see why Jim feels betrayed. Loki says it's radical. Paul K says it's weakened by polemic (meaning, I believe, that it scares him). Peter T says my work has always been a tidemark for him. Peter H says I've always been strong and it moved him. Louie, Val and Sue and their friend say it's wonderful. Cheryl says she loves it. Paul E is silent. Sandra needed it. Nathalie says it's beautiful. self-responsibility for creating a light and joyful atmosphere around ourselves ... freshening ourselves ... we can just expand our feelings, our relaxation our calmness and joy ... a path of openness, compassion and commitment felt as a deep warmth at the center of the heart ... genuine compassion rises from a humble and fearless attitude of openness and generosity ... we welcome others warmly and joyfully into our hearts Tarthang Tulku 3 The new chair of SSHRC on CBC yesterday morning saying his directive is that publicly funded academics now must be willing to tell people about their work. It's five in the dark. I woke thinking the postdoc application begins with Damasio's results about nouns and verbs - language comprehension and construction. Driving around getting framing glass this morning oddly absent-minded. Last night too. Struck my eye with a twig picking grapes in the dark. Drove the bike into Bill Jefferies' jasmine mop and fell on the road. This morning it was backing into the street without seeing approaching cars (slowly approaching). Lost the brakes for a second - air in the line. What are my stars up to? - I go check. Tim says lie low, dodge burning bullets and accidents Thurs/Fri. And then. Absent-mindedly parked at Union Market to find some breakfast, there's someone looking at me. Ja-min. He was in New York but he's here. I take him to Harbour Centre and teach him email. I have to show him how to use the shift key to get @. He is beautiful as a Chinese fairy - the sort of fine-grained beauty that makes people give him passage. Canadian citizenship, a solo show in New York. 4 More bad things. Losing things. This morning I slashed my face with a rose bush. The picture glass didn't fit and I broke it and nicked my finger. Rob said he can't lend money because he's looking at buying a nursery. The bank said no to everything. Two good things. Sean said they aren't going to move in here until Sunday. Muggs says the schools department would pay Rowen's board and room in town probably. Anguish. I know I'm going to do it. Scared of not knowing how. Lonely and overwhelmed. I phone Tom and get lonelier. He's wanting to help but he's ranting. The moon stares in the window. I go silent. I want to cry. He can't stop. He doesn't want me to go without giving me something. He's trying to gear down but he can't find it. He tries again. I've given up getting comforted but now I'm having to ride out his effort. Getting turned down by the bank shocked me. We can hear the rapids, Tom said. 5 Freda at day one of the birdsong conference weeping as she read Rachel Carson's description of a silent spring. Sherry Bie's beautiful face. Evened out today. Phoned Tom this evening full of gratitude for his willingness. 6 What do I want to say about SCG and birds. There's a week in late spring when the garden is in an uproar, fledglings leaving the nest, everyone screaming in the willows. - After the weekend. Calm and gentle, Denise said. I'm back wondering at how much I disliked, couldn't bear, shut down toward, some of the women. Beth with her blowsy shape and flowing dresses, preening ways and habit of sitting so we can see up her inner thighs, her dipsy flakey I'm-so-artistic speech. That little mother who rambled on in a flat dull voice with never an interesting choice of word. The singer from San Diego whose songs were bad and shape ridiculous in a black minidress. The smooth blond presenter who summarized prettily, unendurably. I loved Freda and Rhonda, I liked Val Shaeffer and the strange old man who walks from North Van and back, seven miles, and teaches prospecting to Inuit young men. The blond biologist from Langara who wore short shorts at fifty-some. John Clark in person, Nancy's mountain man from the Witness Project, a white brushcut, pure white. He's my age, face beautiful in profile, and not, head on. Bat ears, a shocked look. Beautiful way of holding his head. Strong legs, thin arms, swollen hands. The old man who walks had dry thin red hair, white at the roots, flowing around his head. Glasses magnifying his eyes to different sizes. Tall but stiff. Good walking shorts, shirt unironed. Man who lives by himself. A slow, pondered way of speaking, some sort of grammar school English, like a ponderous odd schoolboy still, the sort of person who is so tense with loneliness that I want to go away, though he'd be interesting. The livingest person was Sherry Bie, who brimmed, eyes and mouth. 7 Labour Day early. I don't want to be awake. I'm lonely. A fine day with nothing in it. What would I like. Heart, adventure, someone being nice to me. I've been doing errands for weeks and there is another week to go. It's a month since I've seen Tom. This writing is dull. I'm dull. Dave Carter showed up with Jacob when Sean was unloading stuff. There were Trudy and Rhoda at R's window both with arms folded over their midriffs staring at the three of them. Their friend Judith Copithorne in a blue straw hat that makes her look mad showed up at the songbird event yesterday and later at their house. What I'm guessing is that these small appearances at Presentation House and the Roundhouse are scaring them because they are local and indicate that their gossip campaign, and they, have limited effect. This is the most beautiful apartment in Vancouver, Dave said. He really did. And he liked Leaving the land. He liked the epistemology. 8 This week I have to do a lot of small things and three large things. - The first thing I did was go to the bank and ask to speak to Wayne - who was away - so I got the deputy manager. I sat across from her and talked. At the end of the day I was across from Manny. Everyone else had gone home. He let me have a thousand, which is $US 2.50 a day. I had to fight for it too. And didn't he say my line of credit back when I return? There was that, and I sold the web book to Daniel for $20, and Bob is thinking about the bike for $25. Rent from Sean $284. $100 from birdsong on Sunday. Sean and Jojo at the garden crying for their baby, planted a rose in the herb garden. She was conceived at the September full moon, Jojo said. Arnt and the red-haired woman got married in the garden house on Sunday. A young man called Wing wants to deepen the pond because he likes frogs. The sweat lodge helper, Dave, came carrying the four-color stick which signifies refusing drugs and alcohol and defending the weak from violence. He was working in the circle in the blackberries and five golden eagles came from the west and flew north, which means toward the elders. He is a man who isn't native and looks like a copper beagle - flat thin hair like long ears and drooping folds of skin. He's in shaman training, I guess. He said he could feel the spot where Monty died. Newfoundland Dave sat in the throne chair tonight. Evil Tanya is gone but Brian is burning a nauseating incense that gives me a headache. 9 Sheelagh Carpendale. Always her ugly hat, 180 IQ and can't spell, she says. A kind of potato face with sore, living eyes. Distressed being a mother and a computer PhD. Told me today, crying, that she had happened to hear a poem that belongs to one of the higher initiations of Buddhism, and it says May my path be a path that is the path / May my path take me to people / May the people I meet confuse me. Packing, doing laundry, washing the camping stove, filling water cans, cleaning the inside of the car, fixing the bike, buying bungees and trying the bike carrier, buying tea, talking to the registrar's office, gassing up, phoning Choy, cleaning out the glove compartment, checking out fractal tapes, answering email, getting the neurosci conference application signed, signing checks for Choy. Two more days. 10 Thursday 6:30. The big ficus is at Louie's. House mostly packed. I mean its beauties are packed, so it's like living here after I've gone. This time there's so much more detail, what does it mean? What do I think it means. It means I'm not floating correctly? No, it says, it means I'm doing something harder. Oh, alright. And actually I'm raring. What is that word. This side of the gate. Rearing up. Rearing to write a book. Rearing to get into finding. Raring to write, to be in a life where that's all I do, and I put every thread of mind to the technology of doing it. It's a threshold. I'm going to be single like glass. Very soon. Stay in mind of what the detail is for. I'm my own squire getting the gear in order. I like where it says in Sports Illustrated that in Tennessee Pat Summitt can drive as fast as she wants. I haven't always been clear about the difference between theft and earned permission. How does it feel to say that. The way she looks. There's a way to do it without being so self-punishing, or so hard on her kid - who she held back from being born. Imagine if there was that kind of recruiting for stuff that matters - and coaching for it. Little backbiters at the garden, more than there used to be. Thicker on the ground. 11 Alright, what I've done today - washed my hair, phoned Sylvia, and again, gone to bring Mr Choy his checks, at SFU picked up Phil's last letter and part of the scholarship check, arranged for them to bank the rest, got scholarship forms from the grad office, picked up a paper from Loki, dropped copies of Leaving the land with David and at Figaro's, picked up forms at the NFB, banked checks, picked up prescriptions, phoned Presentation House, phoned Walter Quan, at Harbour Center bought stamps and envelope and mailed corrections to Presentation House, emailed Nedjo, cleaned up unix files to try to bring it below the limit, tried again to print SSHRC forms, printed PDF applications, and learned about printing them, emailed SSHRC tech support, copied Acrobat files onto ZIP disk, reloaded pub-html from zip to unix, stopped at Out on Screen, finished machine-sewing pants and put away the machine downstairs, ate standing in the Post Office line. Erased list items. Sorted day's accumulation of paper into folders. Few more things though. Go down and wash the car.
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