2002-12-22

Well, I�m back, and only slightly the worse for wear. Despite the inconvenience of transport and the abuse to my lower back, I�m happy to report that I returned from Toronto with an ass-load more stuff than I went with, thanks to the incredible generosity of my lovely best friend and her lovely husband and to the fact that Toronto is a giant, sweaty, lubed-up consumerist orgy. I engaged in some low-level debauchery at the Horseshoe Tavern and generally had a fantastic time.

My friend did me the honour of actually paying attention to my whining and purchasing me a shiny new bag, bless her heart. It�s just like the last one, except that it�s bigger, has convenient little pockets and partitions for ease of drunken key-locating, and has a red paratrooper patch on the front rather than a red cross (which works out fine for PR purposes, actually, since I�m far more likely to parachute into an active war zone than I am to treat or otherwise give a fuck about a person who has taken ill).

Sadly, along with my truckloads of loot, I am now possessed of a depressing familiarity with the Toronto bus station, having optimistically arrived in the early afternoon yesterday assuming that since buses leave the Ottawa station once an hour for Toronto, that the reverse would also be true, having tragically overestimated the attraction that Ottawa holds for Torontonians, which is a good chunk less than that held by Toronto for the residents of the decidedly un-exciting city of Ottawa. The result of this error in judgment being, of course, that I spent an hour and a half sitting at the terminal. Oh well. My friend�s husband had given me a copy of Nick Hornby�s Fever Pitch, since he had it lying around and wasn�t interested in reading it, and I managed to get through the entire thing during the wait at the station and the bus ride. Good stuff, although assuming that Hornby isn�t exaggerating for comedic effect, I can only conclude that he is indeed off his nut. I love me some Premier League soccer, don�t get me wrong, but Jesus shit, that guy�s obsessed. Fortunately, he�s also very talented and funny, and managed to turn 250 pages of bitching about Arsenal into a pretty entertaining read.

My only regret is that the mother in the seat in front of me didn�t have the manners to share whatever industrial-strength tranquilizer she was on that allowed her to sleep through the unholy racket put up by her brood of howler monkeys for the ENTIRE trip back to Ottawa. What, was she raised in a fucking barn?