This entry is roughly in the general vicinity of 711 words long

I was gazing out across the prairie the other day (cause that’s what you do when the TV’s off) and had a scary moment where I was thought of the slight waves in the horizon as “hills.” I need to see mountains!

People have been asking about another entry, which is nice, cause I work at a newspaper so nobody reads my writing, or they skim it and forget it in 20 minutes. It’s nice to hear someone actually reads something I write, even if it is just rambling. The glitch is I tend to wait until I have good news, or at least something funny to say, which doesn’t seem to happen often.

My Kamloops friends probably won’t even believe me when I say this, but I’ve never been good at making friends, that period was an anomaly. So I’ve been stuck out here for four months without making a single friend. Sure I’ve met everyone in town but aside from the dearth of interesting social activities or places to hang out, I have to cover every event so I can’t take part. Plus people seem distant with me as “media”.

I’m just no good at making friends. It’s like I’m missing a step. It’s always mystified me how people actually become friends. I think I missed that day in kindergarten. I struggle with it at the best of times but here it seems impossible.

I realised the other day that in 16 years in the workforce I’ve never made a friend at work. Ever. I mean I’ve been friendly with people at work, and I have what I suppose you’d call “work friends,” on rare occasions we may even socialise outside work, but we never become friends. Every friend I’ve ever had has come from school, or roommates, or travel.

Anyway, aside from moving 1000 km from home to be poorer and lonelier, I keep stumbling into crap that doesn’t help. At the moment, for example, I’m facing charges for having my car parked on the street without insurance – which was almost unavoidable. Apparently the best case scenario (after my court appearance) is a $280 fine, the worst is jail time. Of course jail time seems extremely unlikely, it’s just the fact that it’d be included that bums me out. Did I really need that added?

OK I did think of one funny thing. There’s a cool commercial for HP photo paper, which you may have seen, the ones with cool picture frame effects and good music. I enjoy the commercials enough that it took me a while to catch the stupid part. They claim the paper will “resist fading for up to 108 years”… What the fuck?!

I mean seriously, what? That breaks down on so many levels it’s mind boggling. “Resists fading” is as vague as you can be. “Hey, it faded!” “Yeah I know but it tried not to.” And what counts as “fading” exactly? And it makes this attempt at not fading for “up to” a time…so it may or may not resist this vague thing for that long, but it may only do it for half that? And my brain starts to tickle when I try to apply all this overlapping vagueness to “108 years”.

I checked the web for clues to this astonishing statement and found they have other papers that “resist fading for up to” 82 years and 115 years respectively. No explanation of what the PR people were smoking when they came up with it.

Oh, I have an unrelated question for you that’s been bugging me. Why do we only use the term Latino to describe people of Spanish decent when Italians are in fact more Latin?

In yet another unrelated thought, I was going to go off on a rant against the U.S. and the evils of the capitalism but I’m tired and have already put out my share of negativity so I’ll just leave you with this thought: in capitalism if a company’s not growing it’s dying, the foundation of the entire structure and thought system is growth…so where does it end?

Parting quote: “Canada? Why should we leave America to visit America Jr.?” - Homer