Sunday, March 25, 2007

Memento

I'm coming down off of one of the most intense weeks of my life. I feel compelled to write about it. I promise on Wednesday there will be a nice, light, fluffy anecdote, but for now I'm going to be selfish instead of entertaining.

Just to make things difficult, I'm going to write about it backwards. It'll be like that movie, Memento — confusing and frustrating.

I just got home from having dim sum at Rol San with The Usual Suspects. They sat us at a HUGE table which could have sat 10, I think. There were people lined up out the door, staring at us with our more-than-half-empty table. Suckers. The waiter had trouble understanding that I wanted to leave the dirty serving dishes on the table so I could take pictures of them. We used the standard white-people-in-Chinatown method of communicating - everyone yelling at once. J'aime le Chinatown.

Before dim sum I rode down to the St Lawrence Market and got some nice pictures of the antique market. I thought it was funny that when I'd ask a seller's permission to take pictures the answer was always, "sure! What's it for, anyway?" Isn't that the kind of thing you'd want to ask before giving me permission? I think I'll get extra prints done and take them back to the sellers.

Last night was the Toronto Symphony Orchestra with S. The opener was a modern piece — the composer is still alive. I was a little worried: in my opinion, dead people write much better music. I was pleasantly surprised. So much so that I really want to try to track down a recording of the piece. It's called Over Thorns To Stars and the composer is Stephen Chatman.

Before that was Photo Adventure Day! T and I met at the Distillery. We had cappuccinos and fresh baked pastries. The pastries were so good that, more than once, I had to stop T in the middle of a sentence so I could finish my stomach orgasm before participating in the conversation again. The weather sucked so we advised A, who was going to meet up with us, not to come since she was already running late and we figured the whole thing was going to be pretty short lived. Mandingo, were we wrong. Photo Adventure Day turned out to be a fabulous success despite the weather. We spent hours at the Distillery.

The second venue for Photo Adventure Day was the St Lawrence Market. We also discovered that we were extremely hungry because it'd been hours since the aforementioned stomach-orgasming-pastries. We found us some crepes. The guy behind the counter was playing Happy Christmas (War Is Over) and we gave him a hard time, to which he responded by turning up the music. In the end it turned out he had pretty good taste and that song was just a lapse in judgement. He even danced and tried to get his boss to dance. The boss offered up one of the other employees as a stripper instead. By the time we'd finished eating, we were both exhuasted and all creatived out. Thus ended Photo Adventure Day, part 1. Please, go to my flickr page and let me know what you think.

Which brings us to Friday. I rushed out of work and hit Henry's and bought my D70, for Photo Adventure Day. I've been sort of hemming and hawing about adding a digital SLR to my collection for a while. I was worried that the old F60 would get jealous, but she took it quite well. I love them both so much. After camera buying, I had pizza with L, took some pictures of her and I with the new D70 and was in bed by, like, 10:30. It was about as pleasant as a Friday evening after work could get.

So, Friday at work. I wound up having to stay late to fix something and I was worried I wasn't going to make Henry's before it closed. Obviously, I did.

So now we draw to the end of our tale. Or the beginning, as it were.

You'll remember that I released some new software a week ago and it had been causing some stress and extra work. Well, the people using it were all done their work by 5:00. It was probably the most relieved I've ever been. Then poker started. I couldn't play because A) I was so spent from the week and B) I had that extra thing to do that I talked about above. It's not a Friday afternoon without a little poker, though, so I went into the lunchroom to watch everyone play for a while. I saw D, one of the guys who uses the new system, walking around. I said, "hey! There's D, with a beer in his hand and a smile on his face."

"I wouldn't say it's a smile," he shot back, "I was out after the first hand."

"Hey, man," I said, "all I can do is get you to the table on time. After that you're not my responsibility. I mean, I'm not a miracle worker."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Let's test the Dead Composers theory. Let's kill Stefen Chatman and see if his music gets better.
M.
(agali)