I have to say, I was proven wrong. Or almost, really. See, I can remember bragging to someone at the zoo a long time ago that while I could get bored while out and waiting for someone, say, I could not ever be bored while at home. Well, I am almost there. I don’t want to watch any more Zim this week, or play any more Guild Wars or watch DVDs or learn piano songs or organize my data folder or anything! I have a couple secret weapons yet to pull out to ward off boredom, but those will only last so long. Like practicing French braids and acrylic painting.

It is torture being home alone all day. Once my brother gets home, I start acting all strange. And then I realize that I’m acting strange, which I attribute to the prolonged withdrawal from human contact. But I went from one extreme to the other. At the zoo I was surrounded by people for hours and by the time it was over, I didn’t want to talk to anyone! But now it’s the opposite.

Luckily, Gemini called this morning saying that they might have some work for me, at least on a temporary basis. At this point I am unendingly thankful for anything they have for me! So I’m going in tomorrow at 10:30. Hope things work out!

The reason I’ve hardly been writing anything is because I’ve hardly been doing anything. I am not complaining, though! I like the lull! Gemini called last Friday to say they had one more person to interview for the job, and then they’d make a decision and call me back one way or the other. So, not hearing from them yet is not so much a bad thing. Waiting is fine. I’m good at it. But, knowing it’d sound bad if they called and I was sleeping, I’ve gotten up relatively early every day this week just in case. It works out well, because then I have the whole day to do things, not just from noon on, you know?

Last Thursday was the day I went to the hockey game with all the zoo people. It was awesome! Pretty much as fun as my great birthday party! Matt decided we should choose someone on the opposing team to boo everytime he had the puck. So we chose #6 arbitrarily. He ended up missing his shot on the shoot-out, so I feel we did our part in earning the Hitmen’s victory. Oh yeah.

Today I went to the zoo with my dad to drop off my work uniform. I really am going to miss everyone there. The zoo was a good job in a way, but I’d never be able to do it for a really long period of time.

We went for Chinese food after church with the regular crowd. Oh, how I love deep-fried over-Westernized Asian food.

So, in replying to one of Aaron’s comments in the last entry, I told him to fill out a customer comment card. By the way, don’t ever fill out a customer comment card at the zoo. They’re typed out and consolidated into several sheets of paper in spreadsheet form and put in the staff room for us to laugh at. I imagine the suits do skim over them, but mostly they just act as pre-shift hilarity for the entry-level staff! Seriously, comment cards are the funniest things you’ll ever read. On the card itself, there’s:

• What was the best part of your visit?
• What was the best part of your visit?
• What can we improve? and
• Where are you visiting from?

Now, the first time someone put, “where are the ligers?” on there, it was kind of funny. Ha, ha, Napoleon Dynamite fan. That’s great! The twentieth time, it’s not as funny.

One guy, in the best part of the zoo section, wrote, “seeing my little girl’s face light up as she watched the hippos!” Okay, well that’s quite poetic for a comment card, but sure! Then under the what can we improve section, he had written, “there needs to be more smoking sections in this zoo, and do you sell alcohol anywhere?” Wow, the poetry came crashing down. Did your girl’s face literally light up? That may have been a drunken hallucination!

There were actually quite a few cards reading, “the animals were boring”. Ah… yes… well, we’re in the process of getting legislation passed that will allow us to go into the animals’ cages and rile them up a bit with tazers! Won’t that be more fun? Seriously, people. Unlike the animals in Madagascar, our animals aren’t much concerned with putting on a good show. They’re more concerned with sleeping, as would I be!

One person put only two words on his comment card: “The bathroom”, under, what was the best part of your visit? Ummm… yes, I suppose the bathrooms are quite amazing, what with the indoor plumbing and exquisite… paper towels…

Three comment cards mentioned this guy Ryan, a zoo keeper who does the informational talks about the gorillas. One called him “very informative,” one called him, “friendly and nice,” and the last articulately wrote, “Ryan, the guy at the gorillas, was HOT!” Perhaps Ryan should have taken up modeling.

Almost all the rest of the comment cards I remember were about the food prices, quality and quantity. Here’s a secret that I have learned and will graciously share with you. If you get food at one of the major tourist locations in the city, especially when it is a fast food setting like Kitamba is, it probably will be overpriced and it probably isn’t going to be Cordon Bleu quality. Surprise!! Now you know!

Ok, I know all my talk of the zoo makes me sound very jaded and stuff. For the record, I’d still eat at the café, and I still like going to the zoo. It’s a pretty place and a good family environment. I have a hard time admitting the customers probably aren’t as stupid as they come off, but I will begrudgingly admit it.

Coming up on my last days at the zoo, here is the summary.

Things I will miss about working at the zoo:

• Working at the zoo. It’s something interesting to say; “I work at the zoo”. Well received generally (except by backwards people like my friend Nick who thinks the zoo is evil and the animals should be set free. Yes, what terrible, terrible people who have spent at least eight years of their lives in Zoology courses and now dedicate themselves to the survival and well-being of all our animal charges. They should burn forever for such compassion). And it’s a beautiful place, with the trees and flowers, and the river. It’s gorgeous and very peaceful in the morning.
• Walking the length of a blue whale twice a day. I’m sure everyone walks the length of a blue whale hundreds of times over each day; But I will miss being informed of my having walked the length of a blue whale, twice a day.
• Being able to retreat into the solitude and peace of the dish pit for half an hour at a time, and being loved for it. (No one likes doing dishes.)
• Box-folding zoo-lympic competitions! Kim was the queen, Matt was the king, and I was just good competition. But I could fold them pretty fast.
• Saying “Ohayo gozaimasu!” to Mike Kamizuru in the morning.
• When Matt was still working, taking the cardboard to the recycling in the club carts.
• Free pop; and
• Making sweet mixes of the pops and giving them names. For example: 7-up, Mountain Dew and lemonade. Adding a shot of Orange Crush made it The Risk. Putting a bit of all the pops was The Suicide and using them all except iced tea (it made it taste a little funny) was called The Suicide Attempt.
• Kids who say they are “partially allergic” to tomatoes and Sarah and I snicker behind their backs once they leave.
• A lot of my buddies have already left the zoo, but of the ones still there I will namely miss the three managers Sarah and Taryn and Penny. I will also miss Rose, Terry, Vinky, Kate, Faizan, and Melony.
• Feeding peacocks crumbs of my lunch.
• My lunches… of chocolate bars, cinnamon buns, fruit cups, salads, croissants and cookies.
• Starting work at 10 am.
• Peeling cheese.
• Frying bacon.
• The staff discount.

Things I won’t miss about working at the zoo:

• Working at the zoo. It was the people, really, who made the job great; not the job itself. I never want to prepare a hot sandwich or scrub floors ever again! (But I probably will!)
• The customers.
• The customers’ stupid questions.
• The customers who come in at eight minutes until close and order three different things.
• Almost everything involved in closing.
• Taking a bus and two trains to get there.
• Customers.
• Customers who ask where obvious things are.
• Customers who think it’s fun to condescend to me because I chose to work a servant’s job this summer.
• The zoo uniform.
• Getting off work at 6 pm.
• SCOW, the stupid staff lunch room and change room. They smell like a poorly-kept pet shop all the time because of all the zoo-keepers we share them with.
• The lazy kitchen runner who picks up back Kitamba shifts but does nothing, and then calls us lazy. Impertinent jerk.
• The boss of my bosses, and his boss.
• The customers!

So, not much has changed in these last couple of days, but I suppose it’s fair to record that I spent most of Saturday morning watching my sweet Narnia DVDs and starting to read my awesome vampire comic book! I had that nagging feeling that I was forgetting something… which I was. The sorting on the Moo, which usually wouldn’t concern me except that I am head girl this year (woah!). So I was on the computer quite a bit that day. After church we came back here (the usual crew) and watched Invader Zim and had pizza. Good times.

Spent some of Sunday on the Moo, and also, I’m trying to learn how to play Le Moulin (by Yann Tiersen, who else?) on the piano. I think it’s more my level than the other one I learned the notes to but don’t have the speed or patience to learn to play properly.

Today was pretty par except that there was a car fire this morning which caused backups in traffic and stuff, catching mother and me on the way to work. Now, anyone who things my mom isn’t highly strung has clearly never experienced her heavy traffic rage. It actually is scary.

I may only be working five (or less) more shifts at the zoo. Woah.

But I haven’t heard from Gemini yet.

Nothing overly much happened between that Sunday and last Monday. One of the guys at work quit/was fired without notice, so Terry and I had to close all that week. Kind of sucky.

Then on Monday night I got a message from Janet saying there may be a job opening for me at Gemini, where she works, and to send her my resume. So I did, and they called me in for an interview which I went to today. I think it went pretty well (at least, I hope it did). They said they’d get back to me sometime next week, so… fingers crossed… In any case, I gave my two weeks notice at the zoo on Tuesday. It was time to move on from there; I need something either better or closer. (Or both, kind of— Gemini’s right on the train line down town. So nice.)

Then tonight was, like, my best birthday party ever! I went to the Corpse Bride with Kim and Eric and Alex and Mark and Jen, and then afterwards we went to Limmericks (except Jen, she was feeling tired. Poor Jenny!). It was fun, and Matt and Cassie came, also! And we ran into Terry when we were there, so just the way it happened, everyone at that table had worked at the zoo at one point. Funny! I got the BBC Narnia series on DVD, and also a vampire comic book. I looove them!

I don’t know what I’m doing with my life! I’ll only be working at the zoo for a little while longer–less than a month hopefully. After that, I’m not really sure. I think something will become clear soon. At least, I hope it will. I wish I could be sure about something for once. It’s why I miss high school so much I think. At least then you know you’re working towards something meaningful. It’s necessary and it’s socially accepted and it’s just all-round what you ought to be doing. Once you have that little slip of paper that says you have graduated high school, well, that’s where my uncertainty began. I think, in the end, what it all boils down to is that I’m not particularly career-minded. I just want to raise kids. Man, I should have been born in the middle ages. Except then my parents would make me marry and old guy in exchange for some goats. That’d suck. In any case, I’m kind of undecided between being a school nurse and a website graphic designer. Seriously, what’s wrong with me? It’s like opposite sides of the brain.

September is my favourite month. Err… in case, you know, anyone was wondering. No one else I’ve talked to about this has admitted to quite understanding what I’m talking about here, but this season, fall, does something to me. It is difficult to depress me in fall. I think there is no season more beautiful. As a child I liked the first day of school because I associated it with autumn. Even just to look at certain pictures of autumn scenes, something deep inside me is jerked into rebirth; it’s like remembering someone say “I love you”. I doubt I’ll ever know why the season so affects me, but I like it.

Pretty busy day today, especially compared to yesterday. All that working (eight days in a row, guh!) caught up with me and even though I woke up around ten in the morning and ate breakfast, I fell asleep after that while listening to Mozart concertos and sitting by the heater in my room. I watched some old home movies of me as a baby and then we went to church. Still, I don’t consider it a wasted day because sometimes it’s good just to have a low-key day. Besides, I went to Brewster’s after with my regular posse (Buzan brothers, my brother and Alexis) and had a grand old time.

Today was Sammy and Matthew’s baptisms so we went to church (late, since we’d heard the sermon already) and saw them. So great! Also today I went to the wedding shower of a girl I knew when I was really young. Really young. Like, I don’t remember anything about her except that I really liked and looked up to her. Things like that seem weird to me. Like, you have this great connection with someone and then it just fades out over the years until all she was, really, is a ghost of my life; a good memory. And age difference seems like so much more when you’re young. In my memory I see her as pretty much an adult. I don’t know how old she is now, but I don’t even think she’s close to thirty. I am probably older now than she was back when I knew her. Do little girls see me like that? Older than I am?

It makes me wonder just how much influence older people had on me in the impressionable ages. A bloody lot, no doubt. I wonder why I love the things I love. I’d bet so much of it could be traced back to all those people. Like, think of it. I love Narnia for example. Who introduced me to Narnia? Jolaine, my most favourite babysitter in my whole universe.

This concludes another session of my musings with no ultimate point.

I saw Brothers Grimm tonight with my own brother and dad and the Buzans. It was pretty good and I liked it but sometimes it seemed a little lacking in flow or transition or something. I don’t know. But it was good.

What a week it’s been.

So, Tuesday was the first day of low season at the zoo, and since Monday was a lot of people’s last full-time shift, we’re down to having about five people in back of house instead of the usual ten or eleven. It’s a big change, and so weird to have so few customers come in. Anyways. The week started off on a bad note right away, because Tuesday was the day that we all found out that one of the zoo’s front of house employees, a seventeen year old girl named Katie had been killed in a car crash on Saturday. So, not even taking her so-young age into consideration, she was a really cheerful girl and it’s so, so tragic that she died. Consequently, this whole week has had that lingering someone has died air to it. You know, when you feel guilty about laughing about things because it seems like a solemn reverie would be much more… sacred.

Because of the short staff, only two people close in the evenings now. And I closed every day this week, augh. Tuesday was Terry and I, and Ryan stayed behind a while to help, too. Since it was our first time closing with so few people, we finished at around 6:30, which is pretty good. Wednesday was the sweet one, though. Terry and I only, and we were out at 6:13. Seriously, that close was epic.

Thursday was Melony and me, but we were sabotaged in our sweet closing because the dish washer broke and the guy was fixing it until 3:30 so all the dishes piled up until then. It was also the day of Katie’s funeral, so the overall mood was very low, and they switched my pizza freezer for a piece-of-crap fridge that isn’t really big enough. But meh. Close took forever because of all the dishes; we weren’t done until after 7:10. If that wasn’t late enough, when we got to the train platform, it was packed. Apparently someone had been hit by a northbound train and so service was delayed a bit. We got to see all the news reporters, though, so it was kind of cool. Penny was so funny! Making faces at the camera and such. Ah, good times. We didn’t see ourselves in the background of the newscast when we watched it later that evening, though. Boo!

Today was a lot better. It was cold and rainy and low season, so that means it wasn’t busy at all. Around eleven, Sarah asked Rose and me if we’d like to help out in the catering kitchen so of course we went. We cut over a thousand buns (literally — I think it was 720 hamburger buns and 640 baguettes) but it was pretty good because the catering kitchen has a radio and I love Rose because she’s awesome. Normally we get glared at when we talk while working, but today we got to have almost three hours of unchecked chatter. It was great! And Alva gave us chocolate bars for free. I did dishes when we went back to Kitamba and I closed with Curran. Done at 6:35. So nothing topped the superhuman Wednesday close of Terry and Colly, but really, you can’t be so great all the time.

Todayborday is Labor day!

But what a sad, sad Labor-dabor it was. Matt’s last day working at the Zoo—what am I going to do without him? Conoco-Phillips has stolen my sunshine, yes, won him over with nothing but a yo-yo… and a paycheck that’s, like, double what he was making before, heh. But it was so sad, him saying goodbye to everyone.

He rather did leave with a bang considering his great lunch time antic! So Penny asked him for a veggie burger in the shape of a heart (like the one he made for Kim) and he made it for her… but then he got an idea. An awful idea. Matt got a wonderful, awful idea. So he proceeded to shape it from a heart into… ah, the shape of a certain part of male anatomy. So when Penny opened it to put relish and stuff on it, she said, ‘Aww, it is in the shape of a heart! …wait a minute… no it’s not!!’ Bahaha, it was so hilarious! Man, I was crying I was laughing so hard.

At the end of the day Matt drove Alex and me to North Gate where she was parked and then he picked me up when he hugged me good-bye. Heh, it was funny but I still cried because I’ll miss him at the zoo. And we listened to sad Yann Tiersen piano music all the way home, hehe.