One Shot 01 - "Snap."

- I keep writing short stories and then putting them away to edit later. What always happens is that i'll come back to it another day and think it's a piece of crap and then delete it. This time i'm just going to do a one shot thing, and let you guys see the crap. Note: I named the guy Justin because i wasn't feeling creative. I don't mean for him to be connected with myself in any way.-

Snap. "Lift your chin a bit."

Snap. "Take a step forward"

Snap. "Stop smiling because i told you to. You're a really crappy actress you know."

Snap. "Think about next year. You're going to be in Paris, if you can't smile about that, you're not a real teenager."

She beamed. He snapped one last photo, and the camera whined. He shut it off and and begun to pack up his equpiment. She took off the gown and handed it to him.

"Thanks Justin, my parents will love them."

"Don't mention it. Just don't forget my espresso tommorow."

"Can't believe we made it through."

"Just barely."

"How were they?"

"You looked great."

They are sitting in a cafe. The rain is pouring and all of the seats are taken, most by people who aren't even ordering. He takes a sip from his espresso and places it carefully on the table. A second later he lifts the small cup to his lips and takes another sip. She's bouncing her knees and working away at a crossword puzzle in the damp newspaper she grabbed from the stand. Her pen breaks through the page and she gives up.

"I was really excited you know."
"I know"

"It was a new place, full of history and art and culture and wine. Actually the wine wasn't a let down..."
"It never is"

"I just wasn't expecting to lose it all. The drive"

He takes another sip. Eyes still locked on hers. Carelessly he spills on his shirt. As she rests her head on the cold window pane she continues to talk as he frantically dabs it with a wad of napkins.

"But it feels like i'm just crawling through each day."

Dab dab dab. "This is why I shouldn't buy white clothes..."

"It makes me wonder if heading to Paris was the wrong idea in the first place. Was it?

He takes a long sip of his espresso. Lowers his cup. Thinks twice and throws back the rest of it. Using the same napkins as before he wipes his mouth. He looks around at all the other people in the cafe, miserable because the weather has ruined their plans. Looking out the window he listens intently, loving the sound of each droplet falling from the heavens to nurture the earth. She's looking at him, eyebrows raised, waiting for the response.

"Do you know what's amazing about photos?"

"Justin come on, i'm pouring my heart out here. At least-"

"-Time. It doesn't exist. A fleeting moment is captured and immortalized. Every emotion and thought in the frame is contained forever."

He removes something from his jacket pocket. He hands her a polaroid. It's losing colour and the edges are frayed. She takes it from him and is surprised to see a younger version of herself smiling away. A genuine smile, filled with emotion and conviction. Conviction that the coming years are filled with promise.

"This is a friend mine. I've recently heard she's gone missing. Can you help me find her?"

She doesn't look away from the photo. She grins. "Of course."

equations.

Wednesday. I'm sitting in Sidney Smith cafeteria with Glenn Sean and Nikko. There's a small Tim Horton's franchise within the caf, and given that the place is populated almost exclusively by sleep deprived, and overachieving students, calling it busy would be an understatement. The line for this Timmies snakes around a corner and almost overlaps on itself. But as Sean has cleverly pointed out to me, the line always reduces as the clock gets closer to the end of the hour. Or maybe this equation would define this line better for you:

N = (60-x)^2 , where N is the length of the line in number of fiending coffee drinkers, and x is the number of minutes after the hour, 0 <= X <>

Anyways. I open with that line definition because i want you all to know just how frustrated i was that i was too engaged in conversation with my buddies to realize that the time (1:58) was getting dangerously close to the hourly reset. Unfortunately for

me, by the time i realized this (2:02), the reset had already occurred and a wave of caffeine junkies were already forming a tight-packed pelvis-gluteus line. Let's do the math and see just how bad the damage was.

1:58, therefore x is equal to 58, N =(60-58)^2 = 4

2:02, therefore x is equal to 02, N =(60-02)^2= 3364

Damage = delta N = N2-N1 = 3364 - 4 = 3360

So basically what this lovely equation is telling us, is that within a 4 minute time window, i managed to miss the opportunity to take advantage of a 4 person line, and instead was confronted with a line of 3364 people. A difference of 3360 people.

Well, i was quite upset, but hey, i'm not going to let that ruin my day, so i stuck around until it was near the end of the hour once more. Finally getting my coffee and donut at the conclusion of an almost 2 hour affair.

I had two sips before i spilled half of it on my leg on my way to class because I hopped over a slush covered curb.

Is a coffee too much to ask for?

On another note, this made me chuckle today when i was downloading something.

I think it's time to upgrade to gold, people.

Jays

Disclamer: If you get really annoyed by me talking about me being annoyed because of the random things that happen in my life, then please do not continue in reading this post because that's pretty much all that it will be composed of. And i wouldn't take offense at you stopping right here because sometimes when i read my own posts i get tired of hearing myself rant, so i feel your pain, and secondly, i wouldn't even know you did.

So, on a whim the other day I went to the mall and bought myself a Blue Jays baseball cap from Lids. No, i'm not a particularly intense Jays fan or anything like that but i figured "Hey, why not have some patriotic spirit and support my fellow Torontonians?"

I was walking to school yesterday morning, and i was waiting on the southwest corner of a busy intersection along with a huge crowd of about 20 other people, a uniform distribution of nearly every ethnicity in existence (Usually i wouldn't remark on the cultural diversity of Toronto; I think most of us are used to, and embrace it by now. That said, i know this seems like a random detail but you'll see why I consider it relevant in just a moment.) There was a really old, beat up car travelling east along the street that i was facing. It switched into the right turn lane and decelerated, preparing to turn south, which would cause it to pass by the crowd and me, only a meter and a half away. The car was occupied by two people, both white. As they made the turn, the passenger rolled down his window, sticking his torso out into the open air, and pointed straight at my head. He yelled, spit flying everywhere, at the top of his lungs: "Look at this FUCKING CHINK wearing a WHITE MAN'S hat." I was completely stunned out of mere disbelief. I looked around to see if anyone else had heard what he had said; wondering if i had just imagined it. Every single person in the crowd, of each and every ethnicity was staring at the ground as if it had the secrets of eternal youth inscribed in it. Not a single person was ballsy enough to even look appalled. Instead they just made like Ostriches and buried their heads.

No, i don't give a dead rat's ass what that stranger thinks about me. He can think of me as a dirty chink for the rest of his life and it won't make my life any less comfortable in the slightest. I've had people be racist to me all my life, it barely even stings nowadays. In fact, i almost feel pity for that guy because he feels the need to say empty words like that to a complete stranger. Maybe it makes him feel important?

What really grinded my nerves though was the fact that there were 20 other people around me, and not a single one of them seemed as if they paid any attention to what he had said. I'm not saying that i expect each and every one of them to get up in arms for me and commit a mass citezens arrest and beat the guy black and blue with a noodle until he apologizes. But I kind of had more faith in the Canadian culture... I expected when i turned around after he had spewed his verbal feces that at least one of them would have even a flicker of thoughts parallel to mine. I was hoping that even though what he said wouldn't change a thing in my life (and trust me, i will go on wearing this hat as much as I please) that they would feel the same kind of pity that I did; that Canada, though with the great cultural progress we've made, still has not completely liberated itself from the prejudice in the minds of some people.

What could they have done to make me not rant about them you might ask? Even just a tiny bit of disgust written in their faces rather than staring at the ground and pretending it didn't happen would have made me a happy camper.

I'll take a risk and even say that i find racial slurs funny sometimes. Not in the "HEY, YOU'RE FOREIGN. HAHAHA" sense, but more the in recognition that everyone in this country comes from a different cultural background, and will therefore be different. I think making light of these differences with good humour is completely acceptable. Hilarious even. Senseless and ignorant categorization however, is an abomination to Canada's achievements to date.

What makes a Jays hat a "white man's hat" anyways? Beats me :P