I just picked a centipede out of my armpit.
Mr. Pyke's backyard is good for anxiety attacks.
The University of Toronto is considerably pickier about even letting non-degree students take graduate courses, they might not let me do that until I can get my GPA up towards a master's.
I've only been here two weeks, but the job situation is looking grim. The work I'm best at is not the sort of thing most companies engage in during economic crisis, and my resum� is far too wild (and would require SERIOUS revamping which I guess I'll start first thing tomorrow) for your generic geekwork.
I don't have enough basic experience to do system administration or out-and-out coding, all my talents hedge on the fact that I have precious knowledge in a few select, admittedly important, but very outlandish and exotics technologies.
Looking down a long list of "I'm sorry but we're not hiring"s and once in a while panic strikes and my heart thumps wildly and this afternoon I ran down to the garden and very slowly and meticulously chopped chunks of fern that had been rotting in the wheelbarrow into the compost heap and soaked each inch in water until my toes were swimming in perfectly gooey mud.
Perfectly gooey is a very difficult to come by consistency, and between the freezing cold of the water and the heat from the sun somewhere in the center of my body was a little kernel of perfectly warm, budding into happy.
Nearing the bottom of the barrow where the ferns had been sitting for weeks in the wet, I grabbed one last fistful of dark and humid and a hundred centipedes swarmed out and up my arms, their red-grey skins shining with slime.
I stood there a little too far beyond shock, covered in crawling things and for a few seconds before it occurred to me to shake them loose, I revelled in the tickle of their swarming, realizing how few people have ever experienced this feeling and a selfish part of me felt strangely proud in that.
A few seconds later, realizing that I should probably be screaming or some similar human reaction, I shook them loose and back into their barrow and went hunting for stragglers and pulled one out of my armpit thinking
"how many people can honestly say that they pulled a centipede from their armpit" and I felt special again
but only because I wanted to, wanted to feel just a tiny bit different, just a tiny bit better
after yesterday's repeated failures at the Rock Oasis.
Sure, I got up the two 5.5's that had been plaguing me, something clicked and my legs suddenly understood how to just DO that thing that they had to, to push me far enough to grab that last rock.
But a 5.5 is what the children climb because they don't have the strength or length to go higher and the thrill was laced with embarassment.
Trying a 5.6 I got past something that I could have never even envisioned my body DOING last week, but swiftly mired myself not a metre from the ground.
Trying a different 5.6, body humming with energy but arms slowly draining of strength...
I didn't even make it off the ground, three fingers still being far too little to hold my weight long enough to maneouver my foot elsewhere.
The only thing I did spectacularly was fall, violently and roughly, bruising my thighs and jerking my limbs in a pale reflection of the rage welling up inside me.
But I'm a monstre, and more resilient than whatever resilience was named after, and the rage lasted into dinner at Sneaky Dee's where the mexican chicken wrap and bottle of moosehead (they only serve pints on tap and I was driving) were little pleasures
and the huge pleasure
was telling someone Kim's story
with real details
the way I've never even really let myself remember it, not that part. Not the ending. And I didn't have the strength to tell the first beginning, or the beginnings after that night, or any of the lessons that stemmed from there, although I tried
And maybe it doesn't make that huge a story
but it came out
and while my failures are still failures I still have aches in my arms denoting strength that is growing in them, and I have time and time again after that to surpass them.
So how poisonous are centipedes, anyway? Cuz my arms itch...