Five: She's gullible and I'm bored.

I know why David Berkowitz killed.

The Son of Sam, according to his own testimony, was commanded to kill by a neighbour's Dog (the neighbour's name was Sam, the dog's was Harvey.) The dog, supposedly possessed by an ancient demon, would bark irresistable orders to kill. Or maybe it just wouldn't shut up and frustrated Berkowitz to the point of homicide. That's kind of how I felt this weekend, when my grandma's dog came to stay over. And when I say weekend, I mean much more than that, because it's Tuesday, and the dog didn't leave until earlier this evening. I could feel a tightness in my chest by the end, and I'm of the belief that the stress of looking after her for two weeks in the summer caused my cyst. (It showed up the day she left. I got very little peace this summer.)

But in any case, she's gone now and I can get on with my life. It's been an eventful few days, in a boring SWP kind of way.

Sunday night I had the most bizarre conversation of my entire life. I was watching the film XChange, which was a low-budget sci-fi thriller shot in Canada like 7 years ago featuring Stephen Baldwin, Kyle McLachlan, and Canadian actor Kim Coates, who was an acquaintence of former WOSS and current Sheridan Drama teacher Mr. Melymick. The film's plot takes place in a world where body-switching is used as a form of transportation (for business trips, etc? It seems very impractical.) Toffler, the character played by the aforementioned actors, must regain his original body (Coates) from a terrorist before the cloned body he is using (Baldwin) expires after like four days. Along the way he does a lot of running and has crazy body-swapped sex. It's the kind of movie you watch late at night on Space and laugh about.

I'm watching this movie, which I first saw many years ago, when a note pops up on my computer, someone's trying to add me to MSN. This is odd, because hell, nobody ever adds me to MSN. I don't give out my Hotmail very often (as I find it embarrassing to still be using a crappy joke that was barely funny when I was in Grade 8,) it's not on my Facebook, etc etc. Nobody adds me and I rarely have to add anyone because anyone I need to talk to on MSN already has me (and twice as many who I don't need.) I don't recognize the e-mail address or the Username. It sounds like a crank. But I think it's completely legit. Consider, now, the movie I just described, while I continue.

He says, "Oh Good, so you have MSN." Before adding, "Are you the person behind the Swap Nation Blog?"

Several months ago, I wrote as part of a fiction blog where the world was facing frequent, unexplained bodyswaps. It was written like news articles and we had a little bit of fun but after a while it got repetitive and lost direction. I lost interest and the thing just petered out. Plus I got the feeling we were just writing spank material for literary fetishists (not that there's anything wrong with that?) This was from like, April until June or July. I hadn't paid it any thought since, and we got virtually no feedback on the blog (part of the reason I quit, I need constant reassurance.)

So when this individual, whom I've never met, mentions the blog, I corked an eyebrow (of course, he couldn't see this.) I tell him, yes, one of them. He asks why it hasn't been updated recently and I give him the general idea that we got tired of the story, and then he asks, dead serious, a question I never could have anticipated.

"Is it real?"

Presenting it as journalism, we didn't bother to write up a disclaimer for the site. We didn't want to ruin the suspension of disbelief, I guess, by admitting it was fake, trusting the ridiculousness of the material would speak for us. I have a habit, whenever someone contacts me for the first time, to jerk them around a bit and have my fun. So I say "It was fiction... or is it?"

As deadpan as MSN can convey, he responds, "Cut the randomness. Is it real?"

I admit, no, wondering exactly what type of person would even have doubt. He identifies himelf as an investigator of metaphysics and magic. He asks my background, I tell him, journalism student. He asks whether I actually know anything about those topics, and I confess, "Only what I make up." He thanks me for being honest about my "falseness" and admits being tripped up by many such fictions before. I'll bet. The conversation ends by him telling me he knows of at least one factual case of documented "soul switch." Or a half of one, in any case. Or something.

The conversation only lasted about 11 minutes and I was on my way to bed, but it was the most bizarre moment of my life. I wished him luck on his endeavours and logged off, pondering, as I drifted off to sleep the mysteries of the universe.

My summary of the conversation - verbatim here except for the Xchange tangent - blew Amanda's mind the next morning when we were talking. I had the day off and we decided to try something radical that we'd brought up before. We met up at Sheridan, at Second Cup, and lurked like weirdos outside the Newsroom all morning. We spoke with Nathan, Leslie, Mary Lynn, and a few of the current second-years who were just wee first-years being mentored by clueless me and Amanda once upon a time. This was, of course, in between our usual conversations.

There was a lot of catching up and accounting for ourselves as our old teachers passed. Me, less so, because I have the convenient status of being still in school. They ask where and I say U of T and that elicits a mildly impressed "Ah, yeah?" or some such. Mary Lynn asked what college I was at (I'm still not sure what the sigificance is of that,) and mused that nobody seemed to go to Victoria anymore. I never really had much choice in the matter, nor would I have known the difference. All the teachers renewed their pledges of letters of recommendation and job leads, particularly for Amanda, who has a bit of pressure on her to succeed given her dedication to the Sun (not to mention the way she ran her internship!)

Eventually, Amanda and I decided to head down to the mall so she could shop and I could pretend to be interested while I crack jokes endlessly. After going through the usual stores, we got lunch - which is unusual for me, but I got Mr. Sub which is not so unusual - and we ran into Tammy and her boyfriend. Eventually we laughed, besmued, about how sad, you could find half of our graduating class hanging out at the mall on a Monday afternoon; Andrew was working at A&W and another classmate of ours works at Sears. Yes, we are a successful bunch. Of course, we always look to Mansoor and Mitch and a few others as models of success. I ran into Dave S. on the bus a few weeks back. We didn't say anything, just nodded in acknowledgement. I wonder what he's doing lately, although the fact that he was on a bus in the middle of the afternoon in Oakville didn't suggest much. Still, he already had experience, so he is way past the "3-5 years in the industry" hurdle we all met. Ditto Mitch, although the bulk of that seems to have been served in Mongolia.

Eventually we split and I went home to hang out all afternoon in frustration at my Dog, avoiding the studying I desperately needed to do for Philosophy. I did it, but I've never been a great studyer so it wasn't as effective as it should ahve been, but certainly more effective than had I not done any at all.

After sleeping two interrupted thirds of the night, I woke up early this morning to head out to my exam, barely recalling what I'd crammed into my head the night before. I brought my notes with the intention of looking them over on the trainride, but I was zonked out despite stopping for Coffee before getting on the train (unusual.) I considered finding some way to look over the notes before the test, but it was too late. I arrived at the building to see a wicked line of people massed around the doorway. There was nowhere to run, this shit was on.

I sat down in the midst of the gym filled with equally confounded students. I got the exam and looked over my options. I had to answer ten of 15 questions, and I was truthfully qualified to address maybe three of them. However, I picked out the names and key terms I remembered and managed to fumble my way through ten, to varying degrees of bullshit. It's better than not writing down anything, that much is true. I know I'm not going to do well on that part of the test, but it was only half. The other 50 was a lengthier essay on cosmological and teleological arguments (well there was another choice but I had nothing to address it.) I actually kind of kicked ass, philosophically-speaking. I walked away from the exam not proud, but not terrified either. I'm just unsure. f I get 60 on the test, I'll consier it a success. I said to my friend, going in, "I've never been less prepared for an exam." It was a learning experience, in that I now know what was expected of me, and how I failed to meet that.

I hacked and sneezed my way through the two hours. I don't know what it is about this cold. I'm not really all that sick, but it crops up every now and again in full force of grossness, primarily during the test. And me without my hankie.

After checking in at a public computer to both kill time and satisfy my e-mail curiosity, I headed to Union. I got a Jr. Chicken sandwich for lunch form McD's - oddly, almost exactly like the chicken burgers we had in the caf - and I was on my way home. Home to TV, to my boredom and laziness, to my miserable canine visitor.

On the train, there was an ad for a depression hotline (or something.) Seeing it, asking whetehr you felt like nothing mattered and then going into the psych-talk about depression, reminded me of a time when I was upset. Probably not depressed, it was too much of a passing thing, but I remember one day in Grade 12 when I was utterly miserable. I don't even remember, by now, what it was about. Was it frustration with school? Was it a girl? was it some combination of a bunch of things? I couldn't tell ya, although it's documented somewhere in the blog. In fact, I just found the entry. I referred to myself as feeling "unloved," which was exactly what I was thinking when I saw the poster. I was really despondent about the lack of appreciation I was getting. I was a really fragile person but have grown over the years to understand these things.

First of all, I was not unloved. I wasn't seein' the love, and sometimes we can't and would rather sit in a haze. But it's only long ater that episode that I've learned it's not really important how much love other people show you. It's only important that you love yourself. I swear. And maybe at the time I didn't. In fact, I'd venture to say that at the time, I was utterly crammed chock full o' self-loathing. I didn't see myself as being loved and didn't see myself as being worthy of love. And I don't use the word "love" a lot and I don't mean romantic love, although I was certainly having a hard time, then as now, but I mean the grander, universal love.

I don't feel that low now, and I haven't in a long while, except during that period in the summer when the world seemed very upside-down for me, so that was a totally different reason for depression. It's not always easy to find love in the universe, but it's a lot harder if you don't start by looking inside yourself.

You dig?

I do believe I am actually going to end the entry on a positive note for once! Odd, considering how I began this sucker...

Keep on rockin'
-Scott