The wheels on the bus

Yesterday a whole bunch more drama got dropped into life. My grandmother fell and broke her hip and went to the hospital. The doctors wanted to operate, but she's an extremely poor candidate due to various things. My mom had to drive down immediately to over see things, and I'm getting around thanks to my godmother and her family.

Luckily, it seems things aren't as serious as it first seemed with my grandmother. So now, of course, I'm just worried with how it affects my weekend plans. I had wanted to get home this weekend, but my mom took with her all my documentation, which makes getting across the border tricky. Through a wonderful coincidence, my dad had to fly up to Vancouver, so he's FedExing me my birth certificate, which, with what ID I have on me, should be enough to get me in.

The only hitch is whether or not it'll get here in time tomorrow for me to catch a bus, first to Montreal, then to New York or something (I'm not totally clear on the details yet). It's a heinous bus ride, 14.5-16.5 hours, that I'm not much looking forward to at all, but what can I say. It's important for me to get home.

Classes are going all right. Some of my professors are great, some of them not very. For some reason, though, I always seem to get terrible English professors. My last one spelled "greatest" with an i. My current one told us about the theme of "solopsism" in the story we read. She then told us not to worry, that big words like that wouldn't be on the exam. Criminy.

I'm starting to enjoy Greek more. For whatever reason, I've always gotten a lot of pleasure out of translating English into Latin, and now that we've gotten far enough in Greek to do some translation, I'm finally getting interested. It also helps that I'm more getting the hang of the crazy accents and suchlike.

I'm just hoping this weekend goes off all right. And that I don't get stranded in New York or something. It should be an adventure.

Changes

Things are going all right up here. My classes are rolling along, I'm doing what I can to stay in touch with people - I don't think my phone's ever seen so much action. Even this weekend passed by pretty easily.

Last weekend was much better, of course. I went down to grab some stuff (just the essential: clothes, a guitar, a bass, and my speaker set) and to see Rachel. Over the next weekends that I go down I plan on diversifying my time so that I don't spend all of it with on person, but this weekend I spent what time I had with Rachel.

Unfortunately, Rachel was sick. I felt really bad for her, since I knew she would have cancelled in other circumstances. As it was, I has a good weekend. We went to the Adventure Aquarium, where I haven't been in many years, and we saw Mirrormask, which was good. It was really good to see her again. Too short a time later I had to go, but I did take something away with me: whatever mild seasonal illness it was that Rachel had.

A question I seem to get a lot is: What do I do up here? The answer is a little disappointing. It's just not that different. My weekends are pretty much the same as they were before I had a girlfriend. There's about as much happening in my neighborhood as there was where I moved from.

The loneliness does get to me, of course. After two full weeks of classes, I've had a total of three conversations. (I think here is where I give a shout-out to Katie, whom I had the longest and most quality of those conversations with). Here's the weird thing: A similar phenomenon seems to be happening to all of the people who I'm closest to.

All of my best friends have told me that this year is feeling really lonely. Obviously, there's a common thread in that for all of them, a good friend moved to Canada, but I think it's larger than that. Maybe part of it is thinking about college. This is the year before the biggest separation most people will know.

Given how senior year has been hyped up since as far back as I can remember, I don't know if people have been grossly misleading, or if things will get better, or if I'm just weird and have weird friends. I'm banking on the things will get better theory. Personally, of course, I am regretful that I'll probably not know what it's like to be a senior. Instead, I'll get to be a college freshman twice. That's not exactly a fair trade, to my mind.

One of the biggest things this has done is made me appreciate what I had and have. It's so very cliche, of course, but nevertheless. Even stranger, and one thing I certainly wasn't expecting, is the feelings of patriotism that have been awakened within me. Here's how that happened.

I'm taking Greek I. I didn't know this, but Greek is a completely insane language. I could rant about that for quite some time so just take me on my word. In one of the more introductory classes my professor was talking about how the accent of spoken Greek changed. He said that the same thing had happened in Canada, too; that if you go to the film archives and dig back a few decades, you'll find that the Canadian accent used to be much stronger. My professor said that it's been highly Americanized. And for the first time, I felt proud, really proud to be an American.

How sick is that?

To recap

In as few words as possible. Old stuff, and some new.

Over the summer, my mom applied for and got an internship doing some work at some museum in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She also secretly got my school shit together and applied me to the University of Ottawa, where I was accepted as a full-time student. However, my parents gave me the choice of going or staying.

Obviously, I chose to stay.

However, I was kind of, not really, kidnapped by my mom and was told that I had made the wrong decision so I don't get to decide. Last week I started going to classes.

Yeah, I'm not sure I've ever been as pissed off. But I'm trying to make the best of the situation. I get to go home at least twice a month, maybe more if I do well in my classes. And I've been told that in mid-to-late December, when the semester ends, I can go back home and finish things up there. Which is, again obviously, what I want to do.

So things got ridiculous super-fast and unexpectedly.

I'm going home this weekend but I'm going to be splitting my time up between packing up my stuff, since I've got none of it since I wasn't expecting to be up here, and spending time with Rachel. This has been really hard on her too, but we're trying to make things work.

I guess I can start filling this blog with witty observations on what it's like to be an American in Canada. Maybe.