September, 2009:

There’s something incredibly sad about sitting by yourself in the ER, waiting to see a doctor. And that you had to ask your building manager to give you a ride to the ER because your only workmate in the neighbourhood didn’t answer his phone, and you didn’t have the cognitive function to find a taxi number to call.

And the reason that you didn’t have the cognitive function was because you’d had a massage over an hour earlier where you came out of it dizzy and nauseated but upon trying to speak realized that you couldn’t form full sentences without stuttering, oh and you couldn’t control your hands very well. And there’s this pinching pain in your neck near your skull that won’t go away, where the RMT had worked really hard.

Upon getting to the ER you discover that you can’t read full sentences either without forgetting the first few words, and can’t follow the show on the ER’s TV even though it’s closed-captioned. You also have a bit of trouble understanding the nurses’ questions. But you get admitted and they take your blood pressure twice to make you feel like you’re getting something for your time, but they decide without telling you that you obviously aren’t that important and will be at the bottom of the triage list after several little kids who can still run around and laugh and seem perfectly alright to me.

But you don’t know you’re at the bottom of the list until you see newer people get put in front of you, but that takes over an hour and in the meantime you’re really worried that you’re having a mini-stroke or something because you’d never been this, well, stupid without also being rather happy from whatever chemicals you inhaled. The only good thing to come out of it is that after an hour and a half you are able to read full sentences again, so you make a personal diagnosis that you’re going to be fine because if you weren’t you would have seen the doctor already, and decide that you’d much rather sleep at home with a cat at your feet than sit in an uncomfortable chair for hours watching sick people stroll by.

I hate Mondays.

There’s some plague going around Kelowna where you’re sick for weeks, in my case 2 and counting. I’m actually quite amazed at how much goo has been coming out of my nose all this time; I’d have thought I’d run out eventually and there’d be an echo in my head from all the freed-up space, but not yet. I never take an illness well so I felt it was enough to just show up to work, come home and pass out every day, screw anything frivolous like this here blahg or personal hygiene.

It was good, then, to get out today and finally check out some wineries, since there are only like a couple hundred around here. Being on the sides of hills they tend to be rather picturesque and sometimes have random touristy things for you to take photos of, like this big statue of a wine bottle pouring into a glass.

I’m really more of a beer person but their establishments aren’t quite as pretty for the most part.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my shoulder being messed up, and it’s at a point now where I’m getting really used to pain radiating up to my head and down my arm, woowee. It took until last Friday for me to realize that my cycling to/from work every day might be aggravating it, which may seem like an obvious idea to you but it never hurt while I was cycling and I assumed it was just always going to spasm no matter what. So now I have to bus to work along with the students and the old people until this shoulder thing gets worked out. I now sort of wish I had a car, but 3 km still seems like a silly distance to drive.

Friends’ parents have been saying how they’re sure I’m going to find myself a husband here and settle down. Perhaps they should just know now that the chance of that is even slimmer here than in Vancouver, and I’m still me, so it’s better just give up and accept my spinsterhood already. The best I could do, and believe me I’m not going to do it unless I’m really drunk and on a dare, would be to go hang out at the Eldorado, tell everyone I’m 25 and bat my eyes at the semi-rich retirees. Even then I don’t believe there’s a large enough window between drunk enough and alcohol poisoning for me to do this.

That’s it for the updates; when I get a social life I’ll let you know, but given the wait I’m sure I’ll blog again before then.

I finally realized something this weekend that had been bothering me for a while. As per usual, the moment of clairvoyance was over beers and some potato-with-cheese concoction, but whatever gets you to the point of understanding, right?

I’ve mentioned before that people at my office smile a lot. A lot of people, a lot of smiling. Unnerving already, but especially bad coming from the higher-ups. My heart stops every time someone in management smiles and greets me. Or asks me how my weekend went, or how I’m enjoying the work. And I just figured out why.

It’s ’cause I’m waiting for the bad news.

Am I so bitter and jaded, has my life been so bad that I assume all smiles are fake and a pretense for saying something that I’m not going to like? It seems I’m expecting these people to then tell me that my puppy drowned or my house burned down. Not that I have either, but I’d still be upset due to the confusion. I’m not kidding, my reaction is that weird.

I seriously need to chill. I’ve been in Kelowna over a month, and I’m still having trouble with the whole nice thing. People just chat with you randomly. The guy standing behind me at Tim Horton’s today told me my shirt tag was stuck out of my collar. Of course I’ve already documented that people here will inform you of wardrobe malfunctions, but it’s not just that. They just chat with you. They don’t want anything from you (except maybe small talk). I just don’t get it.

My manager said he spent two years in Vancouver to go to BCIT but that it was bad because nobody talks to you on the street. That’s exactly what he said. I suppressed my initial response to that, which was, “And that’s a problem how?”. There’s a certain comfort in ignoring everyone, and in being ignored. And in not showing any real concern except to those you’re closest to. Some of you are probably shaking your heads right now, but that’s okay, we don’t all come from the same place. Obviously.

What I dislike the most out of all of this is that now that I’m here, it’s me with the problem. I’m the one who needs to untwist my knickers and relax and show enthusiasm and respond with sincerity to people (versus the usual sarcasm), and suppress the paranoia that nice means anything other than nice. In the meantime I’m having a nervous breakdown, because that’s a lot to ask. And all the while, if I succeed in assimilating with the natives, I am going to be so screwed whenever I move back to Vancouver.

Nobody’s been responding much to my blog entries lately, so I’m going to ask what you think of my reaction. Do you think I’m nuts? Wait, don’t answer that. Instead: have you had similar experiences moving to someplace new? I really don’t have any point of reference here, and feedback would be helpful. Thanks!

(with extra honesty)

So I’ve spent the last few months walking around feeling as if there was duct tape on my back, taping down my right shoulder blade. I couldn’t really voice that idea because it only made sense after my new massage therapist told me yesterday that I have the beginnings of frozen shoulder. I could say “adhesive capsulitis of the scapula” but that sounds like a venereal disease invented by 3M.

The fact that most sufferers of frozen shoulder are women in between the ages of 40 and 60 means I feel extra special that I should be skipping ahead a decade and getting the old timey injuries over with early. Osteoporosis: coming this spring!

Okay, it seems I don’t specifically have adhesive whatsit yet but I need to focus on getting better before the shoulder does get completely stuck. At massage yesterday the poor woman had braced herself against the side of the massage bed, grabbed my shoulder blade with both hands and was using her entire body weight to try to pull it open (I suggested she find someone else to pull me from the opposite direction, but she didn’t think that was necessary). She managed to move it a tiny bit, so there’s hope for me still. She’ll probably find a gummy bear stuck in there (what can I say, sometimes I snack in bed).

How did I get this problem? Well, it turns out that spending a year sitting on a computer chair with your knees up and your feet on the seat while a cat curls up on your thighs, all the while reaching over the cat to type on your laptop keyboard, is not the most ergonomically correct position in which to work. Even if it does look cute. Yeah, I’m surprised too!

On the plus side to all this, I found a good massage therapist! Too bad I’m in a good deal of pain!