While wandering around downtown today with my gay-sian friend (yes, you CAN contract gay and Asian into one word!) and he says
“have you peed in that toilet yet”
And I say
“in what toilet?”
because Keith thinks that everyone can hear his thoughts.
Anyways, it turns out he was referring to the robot potty on 17th Ave SW, which is part of a “City of Calgary Sanitation” project. There is seriously no website about this thing or information. Useless city.
It’s basically this weird roundish box plopped on a street corner. It looks kind of like something they would protect a major electrical center in or something. I decided, as I needed to pee anyways, to make use of it! Plus, I thought it was on my list, even though it is totally not actually on it. The toilet itself is fantastic. It tells you how to use it in a robot voice and cleans itself. You press a BUTTON and a CLEAN TOILET SEAT APPEARS OUT OF THE WALL!!! It also plays calming music for you as you make your business. Rad and a great idea for public bathrooms. Clean and calming!
I’m sad it’s not on my list, but whatever. I peed in a robot today and that in itself is fantastic.
This summer feels like a complete wash. I did go to Kelowna, true, but it has mostly been spent with my nose in books and sitting in classrooms. I guess I’m putting this work in now so I can be done school earlier, but I just want to be travelling and seeing the world. One friend just finished a study in Ghana and is now touring Germany. Irma my artist friend just finished a one month stint in Montreal. Everyone is headed somewhere or just returning and I feel stagnant.
I suppose I am heading to Kingston in around a month, but I have been to Kingston several times. Hell, I lived there for almost ten years. I am desparately trying to convince my mom to go somewhere (anywhere!!) with me over a weekend or after our trip to Kingston but she is very reluctant (much to my dismay). I know I only have 60 or summers left on this planet and it depresses me to some extent this one has been somewhat wasted so far. 6 weeks left before September brings around a new semester of school, I better make the most of it. Roadtrip anyone?
Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, Canada. I loved being there but it was quite cold (in February). Apparently, this is the most photographed thing in all of Canada. Odd.
The lock on the door proved to be quite useful in my Montreal hostel last summer. Easy enough to open if your roommate wanted to lock you out, at least.
I went today somewhat on a whim and took my “Learner’s Exam” as we refer to it here in Alberta and I passed!!! I can start (legally) learning to drive and in a year I can take my driving exam and cross off #42 on my list.
One of the biggest problems I face in life (according to my mom, dental hygienists and my boyfriend’s relatives) is that I don’t have any sense of direction. Yes, I get lost easily, but I mean “sense of direction” more in a Harvard-grad-father-asking-his-coming-of-age-teenage-son-if-he-plans-to-pledge-Kappa kind of way. A where is my life going, as opposed to “where is the train I am on going,” kind of thing. I really, truly have little idea of what I want in life in terms of jobs and making an income. I have a random collection of life goals that really don’t add up to a career or really much of anything other than a kick-ass time on the planet. Everyone I know has some career aspirations by this point, which leaves me drifting alone among the options. Whenever people ask me what I plan to do (dental hygienists are the worst offenders for this, seriously) I just say “government work” which they picture as an cubicle deal but I picture as super secret ninja spy. Obviously this isn’t what I want, because wearing a mask all day would remind me too much of working in Disneyland as a giant puppet.
Rather than taking a stupid online test that will give me 50 possible careers most suited for me (note: these in the past have always included judge, which is awesome, because I would totally style myself after Judge Banks from Fresh Prince) I think it would be best to make a short-list of careers I definitely do not want and a compilation of careers I think I would be both interested in and totally kick ass at.
DO NOT WANT
Fish gutter (the smell, mostly)
Seamstress in the 1870s
Anything to do with the creation of buildings
Dental hygienist
Janitor at Peep Show establishment
Doctor who performs colonoscopies (though it would offer for a multitude of awesome jokes…)
Mother of fifteen
Hugh Hefner’s sponge bath assistant
Intestinal bacteria (just think if your human host ate a whole bulb of garlic, what would that be like?)
Participant on Hell’s Kitchen
Cow breeder (you have to catch semen…really now)
DO WANT
Professional zombie hunter
Japanese cartoon voice actor
Tiffany (touring malls, singing the best song ever written over and over? HECK YES!)
Pillow comfort analyst
Richard Branson’s best friend
Camera person for sea turtle documentaries
Baroness (I don’t honestly know what this is, but it just sounds so cool)
Cheesecake taster
Giant squid (shooting ink and living in the ocean, could life really offer a better profession?)
Town drunk
When I finally gave in and paid for my long overdue tropical vacation to the Dominican, I figured something would go wrong. Rarely does anything ever go as planned in my life, it is an actual curse on my family name (or so the story that I made up goes). This is especially true when it comes to travelling. Occasionally things work out properly, but it’s usually when I am with Adam and his uncanny amount of good luck manages to over ride my cursedness.
So of course when I come home yesterday to find a message from Maria, our lovely Flight Centre travel agent, I was not surprised at all. “Chelsea, please call me back immediately, your resort stay has been cancelled, but don’t worry, it’s a good thing”. Pessimist that I am, I assumed I had been placed on the no fly list or that Adam’s habit of looking like an extremist terrorist had caught up with him. As it turns out, I wasn’t right, but we all saw that coming. Actually, our original resort had been shut down due to health reasons, which they were refusing to communicate to Sunquest about. I guess Sunquest decided for the sake of safety not to send any clients there until it was fully resolved. Fair enough, I’d rather not go somewhere on vacation and die. The awesome part is we got upgraded to a different (and much nicer) resort, still in Punta Cana, for free!
While I don’t doubt that many other things will go awry in the next two weeks before we leave, I’m happy to have gotten past the first inevitable change in plans. These things are to be expected and at least I came out ahead this time, ending up with a better hotel for the price of the apparent death trap I was headed to.
