First week

The days are already lasting longer, and it's only been a week. The sun was coming up orange over the snowy mountains as I was driving to work and listening to music. I caught up with a raven flying along the highway and slowed down as I passed under it. It rode the cushion of air over my car, flying just above my windshield and flapping along to Djo at just the right part, and it was goddamn delightful. I leaned up against the steering wheel to watch it fly, just laughing.

Damn it Steve, this is stuck in my head like a fork 

 

I’m still having night terrors, but more and more my dreams have been getting just… weird. The other night I was in the John Hamm dance meme with him, Betty White, and Christian Siriano, who was annoyed that John wouldn’t put on a bustier because he was self conscious about his middle-aged nipples. This is what happens when you fall asleep under an electric blanket while scrolling Instagram reels. It beats my usual dreams of thin snaking tornadoes and secret passages in scary houses and crashing airplanes, so I’ll take it. (Those aren’t even the nightmares.)

The college is a 2-songs-long drive down the road, and I get to park in the staff lot by the good entrance. My office (I have an office!) is freezing, and not because I’m a weenie - the heating vents are broken. The campus handymen are a couple of guys with matching names who walk around everywhere together in neon safety vests, and they came in to look at the ceiling, cluck their tongues, and then chat with me about dumb local criminals for 20 minutes before leaving without fixing anything. I kind of love them. I got a little space heater to keep my hands thawed, it’s right cozy.

This week I was dropped into the deep end, with introductions and meetings and trainings - but it’s a small pool and I’ve been swimming for years, so I’m doing just fine, paddling around on Teams and getting into all the storage cupboards and learning to use the industrial label maker to print stupid labels for my staplers and tape dispensers. And do you know what colleges have that public libraries don’t - even very small rural colleges in the middle of the ramtops? PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO USE THE PRINTER. 

Zenny has been going to school and coming home a latchkey kid, and she’s loving it. She loves the other kids, she loves the pride stickers posted around her school with nobody being an asshole about them, she loves riding the school bus and having a locker like the kids on tv shows, and she loves having art and music and drama classes because they haven’t been cut from the curriculums in Canada. She’s learning French, throwing snowballs at her friends, and telling me animated stories about the kind of trouble her classmates get up to (sneaking ice in after recess to drop down boys’ collars, getting busted putting on false eyelashes in the washroom - a bit of a change for her from kids threatening to shoot up the school over badminton or blowing up their vapes in the toilet).

I’m not worrying about my dwindling grocery budget or my uncertain housing situation or my future publishing/art prospects, I am still just riding the relief of being gone.