Ex-Tabula Rasa

5ness

I find it difficult to believe that there still ain’t no cure for the summertime blues. You’d think after all this time since it was discovered by Eddie Cochran there’d at least be some kind of medication that can alleviate the symptoms, even if a cure is still many years away. Perhaps it’s because the summertime blues is seen as a fairly inconsequential ailment. But try telling that to someone who can’t use the car because they didn’t work late.

Right now my wife is obsessed with going off to pick strawberries. I have no idea why and assume it’s a pregnancy thing. Like, there’s some hormone being released in her brain that is making her unreasonably eager to go to a strawberry farm. It’s probably from some evolutionary benefit from centuries ago that no longer applies. But she’s always like, “Hey, now we have a car you know what we can do?” and I’m like “Buy bulk groceries? Visit friends who live moderate distances away? Thelma-and-Louise-Clifftop-Suicide-Pact?” and she’s like “PICK STRAWBERRIES!”

Everything that my wife does that’s slightly odd right now I’m attributing to the pregnancy. I’m going to have the shock of my life after the baby’s born and I’m going to be like, “hey remember when you were pregnant and you were crying at the MiniWheats commercial because small edible things reminded you that life is fleeting?” and she’ll start crying again just from the mention of the animated singing breakfast cereal. That’s going to be hard.

I have a friend who is responsible for ordering and storing office supplies in work and sometimes I’ll ask him why there’s no little post-it notes in the supply cupboard and he’ll go and get me, like, ten reams of little post-it notes and I’ll be like, Dammit I don’t need that many and now anyone coming to my cubicle thinks I’m the git who stole all the little post-its and FUCKSOCKS now you think I owe you a favour when I’m actually being inconvenienced here.

At the Torontup last week over dinner in the Kensington Market area I was telling Kelly (who is thoroughly lovely) about a Japanese grocery store nearby where my wife and I went to get a kind of Japanese seaweed we liked. The guy in the store said it was banned in Canada because an idiotic woman ate a load of it dry and then drank water and her stomach expanded. After he pressed us further about our intentions for the seaweed (called Hijiki), he surrupticiously pulled out a big bag of the stuff while nobody was looking, and lo and behold we had a black market under-the-counter supplier of illegal seaweed. I just did some research and it turns out that hijiki is banned not because of some idiotic woman but because it has toxic levels of arsenic in it.